09 — Machine Learning

From kNN and decision trees to LASSO, PCA, and PDS-LASSO for growth regressions.

Learning by example.

This module covers machine learning end-to-end: the bias–variance trade-off (via kNN), classification with decision trees, cross-validation, LASSO/Ridge/Elastic Net regularization, unsupervised learning (PCA and \(k\)-means), and a hands-on application of PDS-LASSO to the cross-country growth and convergence question.

Lecture slides

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This module is part of the full Bielefeld University course (Summer 2026).

Code

Check the course repository for the R scripts.