Mathematical Statistics good for Computer Scientists?

[Pithikos]

I am finished with the first bachelor year at Computer Science and the next courses are: Assembly, Linear Algebra, Statistics, Java. Many people from my class said that they will not take Statistics as it's not that helpful to them and I was thinking of how accurate that is. Is Statistics something that a Computer Scientist will use? Else I could just pick up an other course to replace Statistics.

 

[Niles]

I think it depends on what you are interested in. If you like computational physics, it will not be too bad to know statistics: Brownian motion and random walks.

But knowing statistics in general is a good skill to have, I think at least.

 

[Hobin]

Everyone should know statistics. Take the course. ;)

Also, Java? Blegh.

 

[hadsed]

There are a lot of areas in CS that require some very good statistical analysis. Neural networks, image processing, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence... these are some things that come to my mind when I think CS and stats.