Advanced Quantitative Research Methods

A complete, ready-to-teach university course in statistical learning — ten Beamer decks, ten Jupyter notebooks, nine advanced modules, eight mock exams and the course datasets, sharing one notation and one semester rhythm.

11 decks 901 core slides (+199 optional) 109 exercises with solutions 11 labs (with solutions) 8 advanced modules 3 + 5 mock exams 23 datasets

Prepared by Prof. Dr. Christoph Weisser.

Based on ISLP

These materials follow An Introduction to Statistical Learning, with Applications in Python (James, Witten, Hastie, Tibshirani & Taylor, Springer 2023 — “ISLP”). The structure, topics, notation and labs follow the book; please cite it if you reuse them — see Citation & licence.

Start here

🎓 Learning it

Prerequisites, workload, the skip rule, how to revise — and Colab on day one.

For students
👩‍🏫 Teaching it

Semester plan, per-session runsheets, slide index, one make command.

Teaching it
🛠️ Adapting it

LaTeX sources, generated figures, pinned environment — all editable.

Repository layout

The materials

📚 The course

The 11-session plan, the chapter map, the three split points — and how the course is graded.

The course at a glance
🎞️ Lecture slides

Ten decks: 901 core slides, 199 more in optional appendices, every exercise with a worked solution.

Lecture slides
📓 Lab notebooks

Ten labs, one per deck, each closing with worked solutions — rendered here in full and runnable on Colab or locally.

Lab notebooks
📝 Mock exams

Three full-length papers plus five 60-minute short exams — documented here, distributed on request.

Mock exams
🚀 Quick start

Run a lab in Colab with zero setup; install locally from week two.

Quick start
📊 Datasets

The 23 ISLP datasets bundled with the course, with sizes and where each is used.

Datasets
🐍 Environment

What is pinned, why, and which chapter needs which extra package.

Python environment
🧭 Advanced modules

Nine optional self-study modules: RCTs, Shapley values, conformal prediction, GLMs & splines, SVMs, survival analysis, multiple testing, unsupervised learning, deep learning.

Advanced modules
🎯 Short projects

Six 3–5 hour challenges: a real decision on real data, ending in a memo.

Short projects

What makes these materials different

A whole course, not a pile of files.

Decks, labs and exams that share one notation, one dataset set and one semester rhythm — ready to teach as-is or adapt.

Slides built for the room.

Every deck moves motivation → intuition → formal definition → worked example, with colour-coded callout boxes and 74 short + 35 extended exercises, each followed by a full solution. The hardest, optional material sits in a per-deck appendix, so the main thread fits the sessions it has.

Numbers you can trust.

71 purpose-built figures are computed from the real course datasets (not sketched), 38 more are drawn natively in TikZ, and every mock-exam answer was verified programmatically.

Ready to walk into a room.

Timed runsheets, a generated slide index with page numbers, a ranked cut list for when you are behind, and make check to catch a slide that overruns its frame.

Reproducible by design.

LaTeX sources for every deck and exam, a pinned Python environment, and datasets that resolve automatically — locally and on a fresh Colab runtime.

At a glance

Lecture decks

8 taught ISLP chapters + two precourse decks · 901 slides, plus 199 in optional appendices

Exercises

74 short (~5 min) + 35 extended (~15 min), all with worked solutions

Lab notebooks

10 labs, one per deck (2 precourse + 8 chapters), each closing with worked Python solutions; several also verify the deck’s by-hand arithmetic in code

Mock exams

3 full-length papers, each in 3 formats, + 5 sixty-minute short exams (not distributed publicly)

Datasets

23 CSVs from statlearning.com

Advanced modules

9 optional self-study modules (RCTs, Shapley values, conformal prediction, GLMs & splines, SVMs, survival analysis, multiple testing, unsupervised learning, deep learning) · 688 core slides (+89 in appendices) + 9 notebooks

Short projects

6 challenges on real data, 3–5 h each, each with a fixed held-out set, a baseline to beat and a memo as the deliverable

Semester shape

11 × 180 min: a taught precourse session + 11 chapter sessions · 6 ECTS

Assessment

One written exam at the end of the semester (120 min, 100% of the grade); the eight practice papers do not count

Sources

LaTeX (Beamer) · Jupyter · Python 3.9+ · one make build