The course assumes students are familiar with:
- Probability basics: conditional probability, law of total probabilities, Bayes' theorem;
- Standard discrete distributions (e.g., uniform and binomial distributions);
- The birthday paradox (i.e., the probability of collisions in random samplings);
- Elementary combinatorics: counting permutations and combinations;
- Solving linear systems of equations and Gaussian elimination;
- The computational complexity of simple algorithms.