professor
Abolfazl Safikhani

Overall, my suggestion is to avoid this class (Time Series Analysis) if your intention is to learn useful knowledge and not to waste your tuition. Prof. Safikhani is a generous curver but not so generous as a teacher/professor. He constantly cancelled his office hours due to "conferences", which happened at 7:40 at night? His substitute had no idea what he was talking about and he was not even able to read the PowerPoint proper. Prof. Safikhani asserted that he would not answer any homework questions and would left those to the TAs. Unfortunately, we had appalling lady this semester as our TA, who possessed a hateful attitude towards students in this class. So you really should have a solution to do the HW problems, some of which were never covered in class. It is not surprising that the STAT department is packed with irresponsible faculties. Prof. Safikhani is not the worst, but nor could he be called a good professor. His lecture is wishy-washy and offers no insights to the textbook - in fact, it is just a simplified version of the textbook. He is not able to explain essential proofs. The class is very dull. That said, he is a generous curver - he said he would curve the average to an A-. So if your ultimate goal is for a facade of good grades, he should definitely be in your consideration. Yet, I would say such a grade means nothing more than a letter. At the end of the day, you, as a student, are left confused, helpless and disappointed, having paid so much for a useless class with unhelpful TAs and faculty. So save your money and stay away from this.

This class requires a strong background in probability, calculus and linear algebra. The materials themselves aren't too hard and the lectures are mostly based on the textbook. The lectures themselves can be dry though and the lecture time for this class has always been in the evenings. Stay diligent with the homework as it is long and comprehensive and you will do well in this class. While both undergrads and grads attend the same class, there will be two different curves for each - which will help. He might switch to allowing some of the data modeling to be done in R but for now, there's a program attached with the textbook to do some of the time series labs in the textbook. The program is painfully limited but it's better than doing proofs for homework.

This class was very easy. If you know a little calculus, you will be fine. Safikhani's instruction seemed adequate, I guess, although the whole course was very slow. If you do not know basic probability, this course teaches it, but for most people it will be a waste of time.