Past exam of the systems biology course of the University of Cambridge 2024 Paper 3 1 c Solution 2026-10-20
At the same weight, male mice have an estimated mean testosterone concentration higher than female mice; the sex regression coefficient is an adjusted difference between the groups.
Past exam of the systems biology course of the University of Cambridge 2024 Paper 3 1 d Solution 2026-10-20
At a conventional 5% significance level, there is evidence for an association with sex after adjusting for weight, because its two-sided p-value is . There is insufficient evidence for a weight association after adjusting for sex, because its p-value is .
These Student t-tests test whether the corresponding regression coefficients are zero within the additive multiple linear regression. Failure to reject the weight hypothesis does not establish an exactly zero effect; these associations alone also do not justify a causal inference. The later model with a statistical interaction asks a different question, allowing the weight association to differ by sex.
Past exam of the systems biology course of the University of Cambridge 2024 Paper 3 1 j Solution 2026-10-20
A one-unit increase in testosterone concentration, here , multiplies the expected offspring count by under the Poisson regression with a log link. Thus the exact percentage change in the conditional mean is . The regression coefficient itself is the change in the logarithm of the expected count, not an additive change in offspring number.
Quadratic program 2026-10-14
A quadratic program is an optimization problem with a quadratic objective and linear equality or inequality constraints. A positive-definite objective Hessian makes it strictly convex and coercive; on a nonempty closed feasible set its minimizer exists and is unique. Such a program resolves tied Lasso knots by constraining tangent signs of currently zero regression coefficients while allowing unrestricted tangents for nonzero ones.
Quadratic regression Created 2026-10-07 Updated 2026-10-14
A polynomial regression of degree two is linear in its unknown regression coefficients despite being curved in the predictor. Its design matrix has columns ; three distinct predictor values give full column matrix rank.
Regression analysis Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-20
Regression analysis studies how a response variable depends on explanatory variables through a regression model. It estimates that dependence and assesses uncertainty in fitted regression coefficients, predictions and model comparisons. Linear regression is one important case.
Ridge regression Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
Ridge regression fits a linear regression model while penalizing the size of its slope regression coefficients. For a fixed design matrix containing the slope predictors, observed responses , and an unpenalized regression intercept , the objective isHere is the all-ones vector, and is the squared Euclidean norm of the slopes alone. The first term is the residual sum of squares; the second implements regularization. No random-error assumption is needed to define this fit. The convention is a summed squared-error loss: writing the objective as gives the same fit when .[ref]
Modern regression 1: Ridge regression. slides 5 and 7: summed squared-error objective and unpenalized intercept
For an exact example, reuse the constructed pairs from linear regression. Their sample means are and , and the centered cross-products are and . ThusThe ordinary least squares line has slope and residual sum of squares . At , ridge regression has slope , regression intercept , and residual sum of squares ; at these become , , and . Every line passes through : the penalty reduces the slope while retaining the response sample mean.
The computational benefit is visible after predictor centering. Write for the design matrix with each column's sample mean subtracted, and . The unpenalized intercept in ridge regression gives , and the closed-form ridge regression estimator solvesFor any nonzero vector and , . This positive-definite matrix is therefore invertible even when lacks full column rank, including repeated columns or . The unique penalized slopes resolve the ambiguity of rank-deficient ordinary least squares; they do not supply evidence about slope directions absent from the data. This makes ridge regression useful for multicollinearity.[ref]
High-Dimensional Regression: Ridge. p. 1, equations (1)–(2): uniqueness for positive penalty regardless of design rank
Predictor centering and scaling serve different purposes. Centering handles the free regression intercept. Scaling determines what counts as a large slope: replacing by changes its coefficient to for the same predictions, changing its contribution to an unweighted penalty. A common convention forms standard scores using each nonconstant predictor's sample standard deviation , then penalizes slopes in those coordinates. Since , this is the weighted penalty in the original units. Constant columns have and must be removed before this scaling. Scaling is a modelling choice; equal penalties in original units and in standardized units define different fits.[ref]
Modern regression 1: Ridge regression. slide 7: center predictors, leave the intercept free and scale predictors to sample variance one
The singular value decomposition explains the shrinkage. If is the compact decomposition using the positive singular values , with columns of , thenThe principal-component shrinkage by ridge regression factors are between and : directions with small singular values are damped most. As , the fitted values approach ; the vanishing-penalty ridge limit recovers the ordinary least squares fitted vector as , even if the slope estimates at zero penalty are nonunique. The covariance and bias of a ridge regression estimator describes the resulting bias-variance tradeoff. A penalty can reduce variance of an estimator while introducing bias of an estimator; the unbounded directional risk of fixed ridge shrinkage rules out a uniform improvement for a fixed positive penalty over all possible signals.[ref]
For a second exact construction, choose a centered orthonormal set of three vectors,and set and . The squared singular values are and . At , the fitted coordinates along are , retaining and of their ordinary least squares values . At they become , retaining and . The unfittable component contributes to every residual sum of squares, giving total values , , and at penalties . These are constructed fits, not measured prediction results.
Exact synthetic ridge shrinkage retains the strong singular direction longer than the weak one
. Details. The penalty is a hyperparameter, so fitting slopes at a fixed value and selecting that value are separate tasks. Use a validation set or K-fold cross-validation to compare candidate penalties by held-out squared-error loss. In each split, compute predictor sample means and scales from that split's training data, apply the same transformation to its validation set, and refit the slopes; using held-out information in preprocessing introduces data leakage. Minimum training residual sum of squares cannot select useful shrinkage: ordinary least squares already attains the smallest possible value.[ref]
Model selection and validation 1: Cross-validation. slides 5–8 and 11–14: tuning for prediction, training error and refitting on each training fold
After model selection, refit on all training data with the selected penalty. A separate test set or nested cross-validation assesses the entire selection procedure; a low selected validation score alone is no performance guarantee.[ref]On Over-fitting in Model Selection and Subsequent Selection Bias in Performance Evaluation by Gavin C. Cawley and others. pp. 2079–2080: selection as part of fitting and nested assessment
Simple linear regression Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
Simple linear regression uses one predictor and an intercept, , with . The regression coefficients describe a straight conditional-mean line: is its value at zero and its rate of change per unit of the predictor. When zero is outside the observed range, predictor centering can make the intercept refer to a more representative predictor value.
For fixed predictors and uncorrelated mean-zero errors of common variance , with ,A larger predictor spread improves slope precision under this model. In the worked example and ; the estimated error variance is . A normal linear model gives the slope pivot a Student t-distribution with degrees of freedom. The distinction between a fitted line and a reliable uncertainty statement is precisely the role of the error assumptions.
Universal kriging Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-18
Universal kriging allows an unknown regression drift:The design matrix has full column rank, its entries and are known, and the regression coefficients are unknown. For example, rows and target row allow a linear spatial trend. Requiring to have zero bias for every gives . With known positive-definite matrix observation covariance matrix , the minimizing weights solvewhere is a vector of Lagrange multipliers. Equivalently, the generalized least squares estimate and prediction areThe first term is the estimated trend alone; the second predicts the correlated regression residuals. With , the error variance isThe last, nonnegative term accounts for estimating the specified drift coefficients. Merely inserting a fitted drift into simple kriging and keeping its known-mean error variance would omit this term. For a Gaussian random field, the same expressions arise by integrating over drift coefficients in a diffuse prior distribution limit; this is an additional inferential interpretation, not an assumption required by the linear optimization.[ref]
Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning by Carl Edward Rasmussen and Christopher K. I. Williams. §2.7, pp. 27–28, equations (2.38)–(2.42)

