AI-PhD-S25

AI-PhD-S25

Mono-repo for the PhD course AI for Business Research (DOTE 6635, S25)

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AI-PhD-S25 is a mono-repo for the DOTE 6635 course on AI for Business Research at CUHK Business School. The course aims to provide a fundamental understanding of ML/AI concepts and methods relevant to business research, explore applications of ML/AI in business research, and discover cutting-edge AI/ML technologies. The course resources include Google CoLab for code distribution, Jupyter Notebooks, Google Sheets for group tasks, Overleaf template for lecture notes, replication projects, and access to HPC Server compute resource. The course covers topics like AI/ML in business research, deep learning basics, attention mechanisms, transformer models, LLM pretraining, posttraining, causal inference fundamentals, and more.

README:

πŸ€– Artificial Intelligence for Business Research (Spring 2025)

Course Banner Status PhD Level

πŸ‘₯ Teaching Team

Role Name & Contact
Instructor Renyu (Philip) Zhang
Associate Professor, Department of Decisions, Operations and Technology, CUHK Business School
πŸ“§ [email protected]
πŸ“ @911 Cheng Yu Tung Building
Teaching Assistant Leo Cao
Full-time TA, Department of Decisions, Operations and Technology, CUHK Business School
πŸ“§ [email protected]
Tutorial Instructor Xinyu Li
PhD Candidate (Management Information Systems), CUHK Business School
πŸ“§ [email protected]

πŸ“š Basic Information

  • 🌐 Website: https://github.com/rphilipzhang/AI-PhD-S25
  • ⏰ Time: Tuesday, 12:30pm-3:15pm (Jan 14 - Apr 15, 2025)
    • Excluding: Jan 28 (Chinese New Year) and Mar 4 (Final Project Discussion)
  • πŸ“ Location: Wu Ho Man Yuen Building (WMY) 504

About

Welcome to the mono-repo of DOTE 6635: AI for Business Research at CUHK Business School!

🎯 Learning Objectives:

  • 🧠 Gain fundamental understanding of ML/AI concepts and methods relevant to business research.
  • πŸ’‘ Explore applications of ML/AI in business research over the past decade.
  • πŸš€ Discover and nuture the taste of cutting-edge AI/ML technologies and their potential in your research domain.

Download Syllabus

Virtual Access

Need to join remotely? Use our Zoom link (please seek approval from Philip):

  • πŸŽ₯ Join Meeting
    • Meeting ID: 918 6344 5131
    • Passcode: 459761

πŸ› οΈ Course Resources

Most of the code in this course will be distributed through the Google CoLab cloud computing environment to avoid the incompatibility and version control issues on your local individual computer. On the other hand, you can always download the Jupyter Notebook from CoLab and run it your own computer.

  • πŸ“š The Literature References discussed in the slides can be found on this document.
  • πŸ““ The CoLab files of this course can be found at this folder.
  • πŸ“Š The Google Sheet to sign up for groups and group tasks can be found here.
  • πŸ“ The overleaf template for scribing the lecture notes of this course can be found here.
  • πŸ”¬ The replication projects can be found here.
  • πŸ–₯️ The HPC Server compute resource of the CUHK DOT Department can be found here.

If you have any feedback on this course, please directly contact Philip at [email protected] and we will try our best to address it.

πŸ“š Previous Offerings

πŸ“… Brief Schedule

Subject to modifications. All classes start at 12:30pm and end at 3:15pm.

Session Date Topic Key Words
1 1.14 AI/ML in a Nutshell Course Intro, Prediction in Biz Research
2 1.21 Intro to DL ML Model Evaluations, DL Intro, Neural Nets
3 2.04 LLM (I) DL Computations, Attention Mechanism
4 2.11 LLM (II) Transformer, ViT, DiT
5 2.18 LLM (III) BERT, GPT
6 2.25 LLM (IV) LLM Pre-training, DL Computations
7 3.04 LLM (V) Post-training, Fine-tuning, RLHF, Test-Time Scaling, Inference, Quantization
8 3.11 LLM (VI) Agentic AI, AI as Human Simulators, Applications in Business Research
9 3.18 Causal (I) Causal Inference Intro, RCT, IPW, AIPW
10 3.25 Causal (II) Double Machine Learning, Neyman Orthogonality
11 4.01 Causal (III) ML-Powered Causal Inference, Causal Trees and Forests
12 4.08 Causal (IV) (Off-)Policy Evaluation, Policy Learning
13 4.15 Causal (V) LLM x Causal Inference and Course Wrap-up

πŸ“… Important Dates

All problem sets are due at 12:30pm right before class.

Date Time Event Note
1.15 11:59pm Group Sign-Ups Each group has at most two students.
1.17 7:00pm-9:00pm Python Tutorial Given by Xinyu Li, Python Tutorial CoLab
1.24 7:00pm-9:00pm PyTorch and DOT HPC Server Tutorial Given by Xinyu Li, PyTorch Tutorial CoLab
3.04 9:00am-6:00pm Final Project Discussion Please schedule a meeting with Philip.
3.11 12:30pm Final Project Proposal 1-page maximum
4.30 11:59pm Scribed Lecture Notes Overleaf link
5.11 11:59pm Project Paper, Slides, and Code Paper page limit: 10

πŸ“š Useful External Resources

Find more on the Syllabus and the literature references discussed in the slides.

πŸ“‹ Detailed Schedule

The following schedule is tentative and subject to changes.

πŸ“š Session 1. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in a Nutshell (Jan/14/2025)

  • πŸ”‘ Keywords: Course Introduction, Prediction in Biz Research, Basic ML Models
  • πŸ“Š Slides: Course Intro, Prediction, ML Intro
  • πŸ’» CoLab Notebook Demos: Bootstrap, k-Nearest Neighbors, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting Tree
  • ✍️ Homework: Problem Set 1 - Housing Price Prediction, due at 12:30pm, Feb/4/2025
  • πŸŽ“ Online Python Tutorial: Python Tutorial CoLab, 7:00pm-9:00pm, Jan/17/2025 (Friday), given by Xinyu Li, [email protected]. Zoom Link, Meeting ID: 939 4486 4920, Passcode: 456911
  • πŸ“š References:
    • The Elements of Statistical Learning (2nd Edition), 2009, by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, Jerome Friedman, link to ESL.
    • Probabilistic Machine Learning: An Introduction, 2022, by Kevin Murphy, link to PML.
    • Mullainathan, Sendhil, and Jann Spiess. 2017. Machine learning: an applied econometric approach. Journal of Economic Perspectives 31(2): 87-106.
    • Athey, Susan, and Guido W. Imbens. 2019. Machine learning methods that economists should know about. Annual Review of Economics 11: 685-725.
    • Kleinberg, Jon, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Ziad Obermeyer. 2015. Prediction policy problems. American Economic Review 105(5): 491-495.
    • Hofman, Jake M., et al. 2021. Integrating explanation and prediction in computational social science. Nature 595.7866: 181-188.
    • Bastani, Hamsa, Dennis Zhang, and Heng Zhang. 2022. Applied machine learning in operations management. Innovative Technology at the Interface of Finance and Operations. Springer: 189-222.
    • Kelly, Brian, and Dacheng Xiu. 2023. Financial machine learning, SSRN, link to the paper.
    • The Bitter Lesson, by Rich Sutton, which develops so far the most critical insight of AI: "The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin."
    • Chatpers 1 & 3.2, Scribed Notes of Spring 2024 Course Offering.

πŸ“š Session 2. Model Selection and Deep Learning Basics (Jan/21/2025)

  • πŸ”‘ Keywords: Bias-Variance Trade-off, Cross Validation, Bootstrap, Neural Nets, Computational Issues of Deep Learning
  • πŸ“Š Slides: ML Intro, DL Intro
  • πŸ’» CoLab Notebook Demos: Gradient Descent, Chain Rule, He Innitialization
  • ✍️ Homework: Problem Set 2: Implementing Neural Nets, due at 12:30pm, Feb/11/2025
  • πŸŽ“ Online PyTorch and DOT HPC Server Tutorial: PyTorch Tutorial CoLab, 7:00pm-9:00pm, Jan/24/2025 (Friday), given by Xinyu Li, [email protected]. Zoom Link, Meeting ID: 939 4486 4920, Passcode: 456911
  • πŸ“š References:
    • Deep Learning, 2016, by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville, link to DL.
    • Dive into Deep Learning (2nd Edition), 2023, by Aston Zhang, Zack Lipton, Mu Li, and Alex J. Smola, link to d2dl.
    • Probabilistic Machine Learning: Advanced Topics, 2023, by Kevin Murphy, link to PML2.
    • Deep Learning with PyTorch, 2020, by Eli Stevens, Luca Antiga, and Thomas Viehmann.
    • Dell, Mellissa. 2024. Deep learning for economists. Journal of Economic Literature, forthcoming, link to the paper.
    • Davies, A., VeličkoviΔ‡, P., Buesing, L., Blackwell, S., Zheng, D., TomaΕ‘ev, N., Tanburn, R., Battaglia, P., Blundell, C., JuhΓ‘sz, A. and Lackenby, M., 2021. Advancing mathematics by guiding human intuition with AI. Nature, 600(7887), pp.70-74.
    • Ye, Z., Zhang, Z., Zhang, D., Zhang, H. and Zhang, R.P., 2023. Deep-Learning-Based Causal Inference for Large-Scale Combinatorial Experiments: Theory and Empirical Evidence. Available at SSRN 4375327, link to the paper.
    • Luyang Chen, Markus Pelger, Jason Zhu (2023) Deep Learning in Asset Pricing. Management Science 70(2):714-750.
    • Wang, Z., Gao, R. and Li, S. 2024. Neural-Network Mixed Logit Choice Model: Statistical and Optimality Guarantees. Working paper.
    • Why Does Adam Work So Well? (in Chinese), Overview of gradient descent algorithms
    • Chatpers 1 & 2, Scribed Notes of Spring 2024 Course Offering.

πŸ“š Session 3. Deep Learning Computations and Attention Mechanism (Feb/4/2025)

πŸ“š Session 4. Transformer (Feb/11/2025)

  • πŸ”‘ Keywords: Transformer, ViT, DiT, Decision Transformer
  • πŸ“Š Slides: What's New, Transformer
  • πŸ’» CoLab Notebook Demos: Attention Mechanism, Transformer
  • ✍️ Homework: Problem Set 3: Sentiment Analysis with BERT, due at 12:30pm, Mar/4/2025
  • πŸ“ Presentation of Replication Project: By Xiqing Qin and Yuxin Chen
  • πŸ“š References:
    • Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., ... and Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in neural information processing systems, 30.
    • Qi, Meng, Yuanyuan Shi, Yongzhi Qi, Chenxin Ma, Rong Yuan, Di Wu, Zuo-Jun (Max) Shen. 2023. A Practical End-to-End Inventory Management Model with Deep Learning. Management Science, 69(2): 759-773.
    • Sarzynska-Wawer, Justyna, Aleksander Wawer, Aleksandra Pawlak, Julia Szymanowska, Izabela Stefaniak, Michal Jarkiewicz, and Lukasz Okruszek. 2021. Detecting formal thought disorder by deep contextualized word representations. Psychiatry Research, 304, 114135.
    • Hansen, Stephen, Peter J. Lambert, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Raffaella Sadun, and Bledi Taska. 2023. Remote work across jobs, companies, and space (No. w31007). National Bureau of Economic Research.
    • Chapter 11, Dive into Deep Learning (2nd Edition), 2023, by Aston Zhang, Zack Lipton, Mu Li, and Alex J. Smola, link to d2dl.
    • Lecture Notes and Slides for CS224n: Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning, by Christopher D. Manning, Diyi Yang, and Tatsunori Hashimoto. Link to CS224n.
    • Part 2, Slides for COS 597G: Understanding Large Language Models, by Danqi Chen. Link to COS 597G
    • Illustrated Transformer, Transformer from Scratch with the Code on GitHub.
    • Andrej Karpathy's Lecture: Deep Dive into LLM
    • Chatpers 7 Scribed Notes of Spring 2024 Course Offering.
    • Handwritten Notes

πŸ“š Session 5. LLM Pretraining (Feb/18/2025)

πŸ“š Session 6. LLM Pretraining & Posttraining (Feb/25/2025)

πŸ“š Session 7. LLM Posttraining & Inference (Mar/4/2025)

πŸ“š Session 8. LLM Inference and as Research Tools (Mar/11/2025)

πŸ“š Session 8. Causal Inference Fundamentals (Mar/18/2025)

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