Introduction#
2025 summer preparatory short course for CUHK Econ’s
Last update: July-18-2025
Welcome to Hong Kong, even though remotely.
In our daily life, we are faced with an enormous amount of uncertainty, big or small, for decision making. When and how will you travel from your hometown to Hong Kong for a new chapter of life? Where will you rent your apartment, and how much are you willing to pay? What professional job offers you will get after you graduate with a master’s degree?
In the ivory tower, generations of scholars have built a mathematical language to deal with probability in a systematic manner. Probability is abstract apparatus. But if you throw concrete information into the machinery, sometimes it will provide useful hints.
Now we are in the era of AI. College-level mainstream mathematical formulations are all well-spoken (if not understood) by modern large language models. As a human, what is the point of learning them, given that our propose is not to develop new probability and statistical theories that are out of the reach of AI at this time? The answer, it seems to me, is to have a wider and deeper comprehension of uncertainty in an intuitive and rigorous manner so that we are better enlightened by the truths of the world and life.
Extensive reading#
Besides the lecture notes in this GitHub repository, you will find self-contained lecture notes in the first two chapters of Kevin Sheppard’s Financial Economics I for MSc at University of Oxford.
Interactive code#
The following approaches make it possible to interact with the code cells in the Jupyter notebooks.
Log in CUHK Econ’s SCRP server. Git and Python kernel are already installed there. Download the Github repos by copy and paste
git clone https://github.com/zhentaoshi/Econ_prob.git
Download to your local computer the Github repository. Copy and paste
git clone https://github.com/zhentaoshi/Econ_prob.gitin a terminal if the Git is installed. Jupyter notebook must be installed to run the cells.
License#
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
