Computational Methods and Data Analysis (fall 2003)


General Information

Computational Methods and Data analysis. There are 7 exercises. Exercise 1 and 2 are primarily intended to get to know MATLAB. It is strongly recommended that you make these on your own. No report has to be written for exercise 1 and 2. You do have to write a report for each of the exercises 3 to 7. On these exercises you can work in couples if you prefer so (and provide one report per couple). However, discussion of these reports is again on an individual basis. Final mark is at most one point different from the average mark of the exercises.


Program

  1. Programming with Matlab
  2. Computational Methods
    • Numerical differentiation
    • Ordinary differential equations
    • Root finding
    • Numerical integration
    • Boundary value and partial differential equations
  3. Data analysis
    • Probability and statistics
      - interpretations, distributions, experimental design
    • Parameter estimation
      - maximum likelihood, least-squares
    • Nonlinear methods
      - nonlinear and logistic regression, neural networks


Material

Other resources:


MATLAB

Assignments can in principle be made in any programming language, but use of MATLAB is highly recommended. MATLAB is a high-level scientific and engineering programming environment which allows easy visualization of data, has an extensive library of built-in functions for data manipulation, and is widely used in universities and research labs around the world.

There are many useful introductory MATLAB tutorials online. Probably the one from the University of Utah will suit your needs. This tutorial from the University of Delft is also highly recommended. Note also that once you start MATLAB and are within the MATLAB environment, you can simply type "doc" and a very extensive set of online documentation will come up in your Web browser.

Type "matlab -nojvm" when you start up MATLAB for shutting down the Java virtual machine, in case you like the simple command line interpreter better (as we do).


Questions

Do not ever hesitate to ask us any questions if at some point you are stuck with an assignment or need some help with the material otherwise. The following list indicates who can probably help you best, with a backup in case you cannot reach that person.


Exercise 1

Description


Exercise 2

Description


Exercise 3

Description


Exercise 4

Description
MATLAB files


Exercise 5

Description
Data file


Exercise 6

Description
Data file


Exercise 7

Description
Data file
M-files