Teaching data analysis to engineering master students

A little bit more than a year ago, I was asked to teach the “STAT-H-400” Multivariate data analysis course for a year, as a temporary solution to replace a teacher who had to leave unexpectedly. My hope was to then convert that temporary position into a tenured position with the opening of a chair in Multimodal AI in Medicine this year, but unfortunately I was not selected. My experience as a “university professor” will therefore be short-lived.

I’m still very happy to have had this opportunity, and I’m proud of where I was able to take the course in a year. I’ll keep all the material available at https://stath400.adfoucart.be/. This is clearly a work in progress, which I probably won’t finish, but who knows? Maybe I’ll come back to it sometimes and find a way to recycle it somehow.

So if you’re interested in hypothesis testing, PCA, dimensionality reduction, clustering or supervised learning, there may be some things of interest for you there.

I also like this Top data analysis mistakes in master theses note that I made. The code to produce all experiments and illustrations for the course is also available on Gitlab.

Teaching is something that I really enjoy (at least at the university level, I don’t know how long I would last in a secondary school setting!), and I hope that whatever comes next for me will include at least some of it. It’s stressful, time-consuming, and frustrating at times, but it’s probably the part of my academic career that I enjoyed the most overall.