STAT110: The Probability course you don’t want to miss

I have always been fascinated by probability and statistics ever since I was in high school. I have taken a few courses in probability from school and online courses. But I would say that Joe’s probability course is one of my favorite courses of all time! It helped me grasp a deeper understanding in distribution and conditional probability. It also helped me connect the dots between different distributions and their applications.

Early this year, I have been watching the videos of STAT 110 Probability by Professor Joe Blitzstein on Youtube for 3 times. I almost listened to it before I went to bed every night!

This course also served as a pre-requisite and provide a solid foundation for another stat course I took later in Spring 2018: STAT 171 Introductions to Stochastics Processes by Natesh Pillai (I also recommend this course!)

If you want to learn more about random variables and their distributions, conditional probability and a lot of other interesting stuffs related to probability, don’t forget to check out STAT 110 at the course website. There are a lot of study materials and exercise that you could learn and practice too.

Here is some videos that I like the most (if you want to get a quick gasp of what this course is about and why is this course interesting)

• The “two envelope paradox”. Starting from 46:20 on Lecture 25 to the first part of Lecture 26

I would like to share one more thing quoted from Joe’s in his talk on “The Soul of Statistics” (In case you haven’t seen this video above. Here is a spoiler alert!)

“Conditional is the soul of statistics.”

P.S. I recently heard from Joe’s twitter that “He is working on developing an edX version of Stat 110, and that will indeed have a certificate of completion.” Hopefully the course will be launching on EdX soon!

Update 2018: I audited STAT 210 Probability in Fall 2018, a advance version of STAT 110 and it touched on more measure theory and proofs.

Update 2019: Joe’s Introduction to Probability course launched on Edx! Check the course official website here for more! The second edition of Joe’s probability book with Jessica Hwang is free online here.