Daniel Rabinowitz

I agree that Rabinowitz is not always the best explainer of things. Obviously hes really brilliant but he can't communicate concepts effectively to students because he likes to use vague hand gestures and often illegible scribbles on the chalkboard. However, he tries his best to help students like me who don't know what they are doing. He will never stop explaining things until a student finally understands it. Overall, given the awful reputation of the stat department, I'd say Rabinowitz is nevertheless one of the best. No ambiguities in grading, and if you put in work to understand the concepts, you will do well.

The course was a mess. The lectures were impossible to follow. Not because of the content, but because of the sloppy presentation. It felt like Rabinowitz slapped things together last minute, like he spent only 10 minutes before class preparing for each lecture by taking screenshots of entire pages of the textbook and pasting them on the slides. During the class, it felt like he didn't care about making his lectures more presentable. He accused us of not doing any of the reading, when it was him who wasn't asking answerable questions. The homework was not anything like the lectures. The homework and lectures were not anything like the exams. During the course, I would have told you I hated it. Mostly because I was annoyed by the lack of organization and effort put in by the professor. It seemed like he did not care about the students. Because of lack of preparation, he would not lecture clearly, and to compensate or save time, he would do these atrocious things: -come up with unreasonably tedious examples on the spot -scribble instead of write on the blackboard and assume we know what should have been written there -announce formal definitions or theorems out loud but not write them down -use his hands to smear the chalk instead of using an eraser to erase the board -always re-lecture from scratch and talk about the bigger picture and dumb things down, when he could have done…

He can't teach, he can't be bothered posting accurate, up-to-date homework assignments on time. His practice exams do resemble the actual exams, and are extremely important to doing well in the class, but good luck understanding his badly written (often massively incorrect) solutions until the review session, which he likes to schedule a few days prior to his exams. Other reviewers have written that doing the homework is important to doing well in the course. I disagree. Just study the solutions to practice exams in the 24-72 hours that he gives you to do so. Good luck if you have back to back exams in that time window. Overall, he's a typically incompetent stats instructor, and like most of his ilk, will continue to bring pain, misery, and hatred of stats to students the world over.

Professor Rabinowitz is a very nice professor. However, in class, he is extremely unorganized and he is not the best at explaining concepts. There were many times when he would try to explain a concept again only for the MA students (and handful of undergrads) to stare blankly back at him. Furthermore, his homeworks were very confusing. He would constantly have to update the problems because they were not clear. They were also quite challenging and required going to office hours to understand how to solve the problems (even the TAs did not understand sometimes). Despite these failings, though, Dan really does make an effort. He really cares about the students and holds lots of office hours to help students. During reading week, he held at least three final review sessions, each of which were a few hours long. I think that he doesn't usually teach Data Mining, hence his inexperience. However, if you seek help, Dan will go the extra mile to help you out. It's not likely that Dan will teach Data Mining any time soon again, but in case he does, I suggest taking advantage of office hours, since Dan is very helpful then. Also, there is a huge overlap with Statistical Machine Learning in terms of content.

Rabinowitz seemed bored out of his mind teaching our class. He put no effort into teaching it and was then frustrated that we didn't all understand everything. His tests in no way reflect the study guides or homework materials. There isn't much due for this class, but it is essentially self taught. It really makes me wonder why I'm paying so much tuition. I would strongly recommend taking this class from someone else.

There is a reason that Prof. Dan Rabinowitz is the chair of the Stats department. He is amazing! He's great at explaining complex theories, using everyday common analogies to convey his points. However, the material is hard! He assigns homework to help you with the theories, but the great thing is that poor homework (or no homework at all) does not affect your grade. BUT I URGE YOU TO DO THE HOMEWORK OR YOU WILL BE LOST!

Professor Rabinowitz clearly understands what he is talking about. But unfortunately, that doesn't mean you will. He's a very, very nice guy, but his being nice (a) does not mean he can teach, and (b) does not justify one's taking his course. In fact, I would advise avoiding his Stat Inference course at all costs. The thing about Dan is that, unlike any normal stat/math professor, he seems to believe in the power of abstract explanations wholly divorced from concrete examples - which is really quite useful in an APPLIED field. This is the first and only class that has made me ashamed to be a student at Columbia. Save yourself a few credits and read http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~dsmall/stat512-s05/ .

I couldn't have been more pleasantly surprised by this course and this professor. I was taking this class pass/fail, and so did not consistently turn in my homework, but nonetheless did extremely well on the exams. Seriously, I would want to take any class with this man. He has so much heart, and is engaging, and really explains concepts very clearly to non-statistics majors/students like myself. He also spends an extraordinary amount of time personally addressing student's questions via emails, office hours, etc and is highly involved with the class. He prepares you for the exams with practice exams that he goes over in detail, so that you will know how to answer every question on the exam. I highly recommend this professor and this course.

Great teacher! He explains everything well in fluent English (a plus for any statistics course), and he cares. He is readily available for any extra help you might need. However, there is homework due every class. They don't count for much, but if you do bad on the exams they will help you. The class is 6 points so you already know that you have to commit extra time to it. Don't expect a curve because the grad students do ruin it by getting perfect scores. The class is 3 hours long, but he usually lets you out around 8.

这门课还是很硬核的，基本将inference的内容涵盖了，这对于一个statistician而言是很重要的一门课