Two important statistical modeling courses are coming up in May.

May 18 – Jun 15: Principal Components and Factor Analysis

May 18 – Jun 15: Modeling Count Data

Factor analysis is used frequently in social science research where you want to examine that which you cannot observe (latent variables) using data that you can observe. Both factor analysis and principal components analysis have become more popular in recent years with the advent of data mining – these techniques help consolidate features and reduce the dimensionality of data.

Count data modeling is widely used in medical analysis (e.g. in counts of subjects and events in a clinical trial), but is also more widely applicable – for example, in counting events (e.g. clicks or purchases) on the web.