This document discusses sparse linear models and Bayesian variable selection. It introduces the spike and slab model for Bayesian variable selection, which uses a binary vector γ to indicate whether features are relevant or not. Computing the posterior p(γ|D) involves calculating the marginal likelihood p(D|γ). Greedy search and stochastic search methods are discussed to approximate the posterior over models. L1 regularization, also known as lasso, is introduced as an optimization technique since computing the posterior for discrete γ is difficult. Lasso replaces the discrete priors with continuous priors to encourage sparsity. Coordinate descent is discussed as an algorithm to optimize the lasso objective function.