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by bonoboTP 2106 days ago
Statistics is not really in focus in most CS programs. Indeed I'm not sure where it is. Perhaps in applied math programs. Stats is kinda too dirty and realworld for pure math types, and in science programs and medicine it's usually just taught as a bunch of magic formulas to memorize and rules of thumb passed down from generation to generation without understanding. Perhaps physics departments do have both the necessary math skills and the need for stats so they may provide a good education in this.

But having studied in 3 universities in different countries, CS just doesn't care about stats. Probability theory yes, but frequentist topics like statistical tests not really.

1 comments

This was my experience at a high ranking engineering public state school in the US. Stats is delegated to the applied math program usually (in fact, my degree was titled "Applied Mathematics & Statistics"). You can choose to concentrate in subjects like algorithms, operations research, fin stuff, statistics, etc. CS as well as other sciences had one required intro to prob & stats, but that's it outside electives.

Further, despite having a fantastic reputation, my program only discussed frequentist ideas with near 0 mention of Bayesian reasoning/methods (outside the same Bayes rule questions asked in the first weeks of every stats class). Overall the education felt too traditional, I would have liked to seen mention of more modern methods like the bootstrap and certainly mention of Bayesian.

> Stats is delegated to the applied math program usually

Which is not unsreasonable considering that these things arent really related to computers (although they happen to involve computation). I think its just an artifact of history and how things happened that ML is associated with CS and EE departments, but really its applied math, not a core CS topic like say compilers, formal languages and complexity.