ECON 140C: MACH LEARNING & AI

University of California, Santa Barbara

An introduction to core machine learning and nonparametric tools for econom ics, emphasizing prediction, classification, and causal inference. Students learn how to build, tune, and evaluate modern methods such as partitioned regression and splines, binned scatter plots, LASSO and ridge regression, d ecision trees, random forests, and neural networks. Time permitting the cou rse covers embeddings, transformers, and attention. Computation using R is emphasized using real-world data.