Maybe Professor Chen revamped the class this quarter (so maybe the topics are different now), but I thoroughly enjoyed 102B and thought the curriculum wasn't scattered at all. It's a digestible, effective introduction to popular machine learning concepts and algorithms for constructing models and conducting analysis. No curveballs on the exams, it all depends on how much effort you put into preparing for them. Professor Chen comes to class everyday with a smile on his face, and he does a wonderful job preparing you with a solid foundation and intuition for the course material in case you want to explore any of them in greater detail, and that's honestly all the space there is for a 10 week class. Had a blast this quarter, thanks Professor Chen! :)

I took the entire 102 series with Miles, and I have to say he is one of the clearest professors in the stats department. You can completely follow him and figure out what he expects after one quarter with him.

So this is kinda a review for the entire 102 series with Miles. 102A is mostly about coding, and he taught useful coding techniques and fun staff in class. There was a tic-tac-toe project and a monopoly project that are time-consuming (took me about one day for each) but are really accomplishing when you finish.

102B is the most math heavy, and all the matrix notations are kind of overwhelming at the very beginning. However, Miles really explains all the different machine learning methods out in a way that is easy to understand, and I have to say it is very helpful to have known different machine learning concepts when interviewing for researches.

For me, 102C is the easiest among the entire series. Just follow Miles' hand-written notes in class, and you would be fine.

Miles is also helpful in his office hours (He helped me a couple of times when it wasn't really his office hours but he happened to be in the office!) Also his office is super organized, and I was impressed LMAO.

Generally I really recommend Miles for STATS 102 series.

Somehow, the stats dept has the worst lecturers for the proof based classes, but for the coding side, they have the best professors around. Like Tsiang, Chen is one of my favorite professors here at UCLA.

His lectures, while potentially dry, are actually interesting, and you build on a lot of the concept you learn from Stats 20. You start going into optimization techniques, different common packages, and some object oriented topics.

Chen may come off cold in office hours, but tbh, the questions people ask him are kinda dumb. He's not going to troubleshoot your code, nor blatantly tell you how to do it. And honestly, his homework is definitely doable - you just have to understand the notes front and back, and know how to apply it(basically, don't be lazy). But he's an interesting person, and once you start talking to him, it's really chill. He's very open to helping with letter of recommendations, and is an interesting guy(loves basketball, grew up in LA, and had a crazy life). He actually cares about his students, telling you to sleep, letting you skip some classes without penalty, etc. Just don't try and cheat his attendance system - it's barely worth any points, and it's worse to be caught skipping and forfeiting all your attendance points for the quarter.

Mr. Miles Chen is literally one of the best professors I've had at UCLA so far.
He is a great instructor in that he is very clear on what concepts are important to understand and know for exams. In lecture (which he records), he will provide multiple examples so that you really understand the concepts (rather than just memorize formulas). He also is very gracious in terms of homework and participation, and I didn't find the workload to be hard or tedious. Obviously read your textbook and do practice problems on your own, but that's not asking a lot.
But what makes him great isn't his teaching skills, but his care for you outside of the classroom. I remember before our midterm, he told us that grades are just a number, and that they don't determine our worth. This helped ease my test-taking experience, but also made me realize that some professors really do care for your mental well-being and emotional health. He encourages you to have fun outside the classroom and to rest. I think this is advice that not a lot of professors just give because (truthfully) a lot of professors don't really care.
We need more professors like Miles.

Took this class during the summer and got a B+, which is great imo. However, I believe that many of the reviews give over-inflated reviews, such as the review below me claiming they got an "A" when grades hadn't even been uploaded by the time they posted the review.
This was a good class, but nothing out of the ordinary- all he did was literally do his job, which was teach properly and show that he's actually one of the few teachers that care about his students.
I think the first final was difficult and the second final was moderate. This class felt very rushed, but would sometimes get very boring during the two hours (I even saw some people fall asleep during the class).
I came in having these really high expectations but honestly, it was whatever. Nevertheless, he is a great person and a great teacher, I just would not say this class is a walk in the park. I would suggest going to lectures and the labs because some lab content was very confusing but our TA (who was great too) walked us through it.
TLDR: Go to class/discussion/lab. Study. Don't go in overconfident. Does require you to focus and review. Class: 7/10. Professor: 8.5/10. I would suggest to take this class throughout a quarter instead of a summer course.

professor Chen offers zero of second chance. none of the homework are dropped. no make up assignments or any other chance to raise grade. failing once means it is the end of your world. I would not take his class again

This class is such a Nightmare. homework assignments are ridiculously long and tough to complete, lectures are clear but useless. his in class exams are not relating to what he mentioned before. kind of tricky to test students and the most disaster is his grading scale. 30% of non dropped homework along with 36% class exams and final. campus wire is a joke as well. there is no way to get 50 upvokes to reach eagle level. stay away from Professor Chen and save your life. This class brings anxiety and depression to me

Much of the learning is done through Data Camp, plus some in-class presentations in Jupyter notebook by Prof Chen. Lectures are recorded and posted on YouTube, so attendance is not necessary (Almost no one attended the last 2 lectures before Thanksgiving). Felt like only learned mostly from Data Camp exercises for data analysis, only the last few lectures were brand new material outside Data Camp. Not the best class to fully master Python as modeling and ML techniques were only simply or briefly discussed

Summer session for 102B was pretty watered down, skipped a lot of proofs and the final chapter on PCA. Lectures were all uploaded to YouTube but attendance was required. Felt like I didn't learn much about applying ML techniques for extensive data analysis but got an easy A. Lectures were a bit rushed and unclear on neural l networks since summer had limited time. HW seemed unchanged from previous years as there were issues with R version above 3.0 , which was addressed very late into the session. A bit disappointed in the lack of interest/input

Professor Chen is a great Professor overall. He explained everything well and made sure to explain things in a way people could understand. The workload is EXTREMELY light aka one midterm and the final (he doesn’t grade homework) BUT make sure to do the hw problems anyways because they’ll help you a lot !!!