In the introduction of my course next week, I will (briefly) mention networks, and I wanted to provide some illustration of the Friendship Paradox. On network of thrones (discussed in Beveridge and Shan (2016)), there is a dataset with the network of characters in Game of Thrones. The word “friend” might ...

My previous post was explaining how mathematically it was possible to parallelize computation to estimate the parameters of a linear regression. More speficially, we have a matrix which is matrix and a -dimensional vector, and we want to compute by spliting the job. Instead of using the observations, we’ve ...

After my series of post on classification algorithms, it’s time to get back to R codes, this time for quantile regression. Yes, I still want to get a better understanding of optimization routines, in R. Before looking at the quantile regression, let us compute the median, or the quantile, ...

Tuesday, we got our conference “Insurance, Actuarial Science, Data & Models” and Dylan Possamaï gave a very interesting concluding talk. In the introduction, he came back briefly on a nice discussion we usually have in economics on the kind of model we should consider. It was about optimal control. In many ...

Eleventh post of our series on classification from scratch. Today, that should be the last one… unless I forgot something important. So today, we discuss boosting. An econometrician perspective I might start with a non-conventional introduction. But that’s actually how I understood what boosting was about. And I am ...

Tenth post of our series on classification from scratch. Today, we’ll see the heuristics of the algorithm inside bagging techniques. Often, bagging is associated with trees, to generate forests. But actually, it is possible using bagging for any kind of model. Recall that bagging means “boostrap aggregation”. So, consider ...

Eighth post of our series on classification from scratch. The latest one was on the SVM, and today, I want to get back on very old stuff, with here also a linear separation of the space, using Fisher’s linear discriminent analysis. Bayes (naive) classifier Consider the follwing naive classification ...

Seventh post of our series on classification from scratch. The latest one was on the neural nets, and today, we will discuss SVM, support vector machines. A formal introduction Here takes values in . Our model will be Thus, the space is divided by a (linear) border The distance from point ...

Sixth post of our series on classification from scratch. The latest one was on the lasso regression, which was still based on a logistic regression model, assuming that the variable of interest has a Bernoulli distribution. From now on, we will discuss technique that did not originate from those probabilistic ...

Fifth post of our series on classification from scratch, following the previous post on penalization using the norm (so-called Ridge regression), this time, we will discuss penalization based on the norm (the so-called Lasso regression). First of all, one should admit that if the name stands for least absolute shrinkage ...

Fourth post of our series on classification from scratch, following the previous post which was some sort of detour on kernels. But today, we’ll get back on the logistic model. Formal approach of the problem We’ve seen before that the classical estimation technique used to estimate the parameters ...

Third post of our series on classification from scratch, following the previous post introducing smoothing techniques, with (b)-splines. Consider here kernel based techniques. Note that here, we do not use the “logistic” model… it is purely non-parametric. kernel based estimated, from scratch I like kernels because they are somehow ...

Nineth post of our series on classification from scratch. Today, we’ll see the heuristics of the algorithm inside classification trees. And yes, I promised eight posts in that series, but clearly, that was not sufficient… sorry for the poor prediction. Decision Tree Decision trees are easy to read. So ...

Today, second post of our series on classification from scratch, following the brief introduction on the logistic regression. Piecewise linear splines To illustrate what’s going on, let us start with a “simple” regression (with only one explanatory variable). The underlying idea is natura non facit saltus, for “nature does ...

Let us start today our series on classification from scratch… The logistic regression is based on the assumption that given covariates , has a Bernoulli distribution,The goal is to estimate parameter . Recall that the heuristics for the use of that function for the probability is that Maximimum of the (log)...

Before my course on « big data and economics » at the university of Barcelona in July, I wanted to upload a series of posts on classification techniques, to get an insight on machine learning tools. According to some common idea, machine learning algorithms are black boxes. I wanted to get back ...

Yesterday evening, I was walking in Budapest, and I saw some nice map that was some sort of Otto Neurath style. It was hand-made but I thought it should be possible to do it in R, automatically. A few years ago, Baptiste Coulmont published a nice blog post on the ...

15 years ago, a student of mine told me that I should start learning Python, that it was really a great language. Students started to learn it, but I kept postponing. A few years ago, I started also Python for Kids, which is really nice actually, with my son. That was ...