Originally published at Konstantin's Private Blog. You can comment here or there.

In the previous post, I discussed SAS in detail. Now I will turn to my favorite package, Stata. Five years ago nobody would seriously consider it as an option for dealing with large datasets. Today, it is probably one of the most effective tools of which I am aware ( Read more... )

Originally published at Konstantin's Private Blog. You can comment here or there.

In the previous posts I talked primarily on what to do and what not to do when working with data. Now I want to switch gears a bit and discuss the tools of the trade, i.e. the packages and programming environments one could use to this end. I have probably had a chance ( Read more... )

Originally published at Konstantin's Private Blog. You can comment here or there.
Last time I mentioned that applying structural econometric models to datasets with millions of records is prohibitively time-consuming in most cases. This brings me to the «chicken-and-egg» problem of empirical work: which is more important, data or algorithms (models ( Read more... )

Originally published at Konstantin's Private Blog. You can comment here or there.

I went to graduate school in Minnesota, a fountainhead of structural economic modeling. My particular field of economics - Empirical Industrial Organization (IO) - is primarily built around bringing complicated models of firm and consumer behavior to the data. The ( Read more... )

Originally published at Konstantin's Private Blog. You can comment here or there.

Recently I have come across a number of comments online that shared a similar set of arguments. In a nutshell, they go as follows: Apple demonstrates fourth most impressive quarter ever - stock prices fall; Facebook beats revenue and profits forecasts - stock prices ( Read more... )

Originally published at Konstantin's Private Blog. You can comment here or there.

My two previous blog posts were, to a large extent, inspired by this paper by Leo Breiman, whom I already mentioned. While I do not feel that I can entirely agree with his arguments, they are, without a doubt, worth considering.

Originally published at Konstantin's Private Blog. You can comment here or there.

Previously I mentioned what machine learners do better than most economists. Now I want to bring up a slightly more controversial distinction. Many machine learning applications are fundamentally less willing to make assumptions. This may sound a bit abstract and ( Read more... )

Originally published at Konstantin's Private Blog. You can comment here or there.

According to the late Leo Breiman, people who work with data generally come from one of the two camps: statisticians and machine learners. In economics, we are much closer to statisticians than machine learners. The differences between the camps are numerous and I ( Read more... )

Originally published at Konstantin's Private Blog. You can comment here or there.

A number of data facts that are by now obvious were anything but obvious for me when I started. Most statistics that I learned at school dealt with conditional means, and, sometimes, variances. The focus on the first two moments makes sense for bell-shaped ( Read more... )

Originally published at Konstantin's Private Blog. You can comment here or there.

I have decided to resume blogging, but this time I will host it on my personal website. It will cross-post entries to my old blog automatically unless I choose to do otherwise.

I intend to write mostly on professional and related issues. This includes economics, ( Read more... )