Next week, I will be in Manizales, Colombia, for the Third International Congress on Actuarial Science and Quantitative Finance. I will be giving a lecture on Wednesday with Jed Fress and Emilianos Valdez. I will give my course on Algorithms for Predictive Modeling on Thursday morning (after Jed and Emil’...

Before moving to cross-validation, it was natural to say “I will burn 50% (say) of my data to train a model, and then use the remaining to fit the model”. For instance, we can use training data for variable selection (e.g. using some stepwise procedure in a logistic regression), and ...

Last Friday, we discussed the use of ROC curves to describe the goodness of a classifier. I did say that I will post a brief paragraph on the interpretation of the diagonal. If you look around some say that it describes the “strategy of randomly guessing a class“, that it ...

Each time we have a case study in my actuarial courses (with real data), students are surprised to have hard time getting a “good” model, and they are always surprised to have a low AUC, when trying to model the probability to claim a loss, to die, to fraud, etc. ...

For my lectures on applied linear models, I wanted to illustrate the fact that the is never a good measure of the goodness of the model, since it’s quite easy to improve it. Consider the following dataset n=100 df=data.frame(matrix(rnorm(n*n),n,n)) names(df)=...

In a previous post, I discussed how it was possible to scrap the NSERC website to get stats about discovery grants. Since we just got the new 2018 figures, I thought it would be a good opportunity to update my graphs, library(XML) library(stringr) url="http://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/...

Real-time computation (or estimation) of the “probability to win” is difficult. We’ve seem that in soccer games, in elections… but actually, as a professor, I see that frequently when I grade my students. Consider a classical multiple choice exam. After each question, imagine that you try to compute the ...

Some pre-Halloween post today. It started actually while I was in Barcelona : kids wanted to go back to some store we’ve seen the first day, in the gothic part, and I could not remember where it was. And I said to myself that would be quite long to do ...

In 2012, Danielle Herbert, Adrian Barnett, Philip Clarke and Nicholas Graves published an article entitled “on the time spent preparing grant proposals: an observational study of Australian researchers“, whose conclusions had been included in Nature under a more explicit title, “Australia’s grant system wastes time” ! In this study, they included 3700 ...

Each time we face real applications in an applied econometrics course, we have to deal with categorial variables. And the same question arise, from students : how can we combine automatically factor levels ? Is there a simple R function ? I did upload a few blog posts, over the pas years. But ...

This morning during the lecture on nonlinear regression, I mentioned (very) briefly the case of convex regression. Since I forgot to mention the codes in R, I will publish them here. Assume that where is some convex function. Then is convex if and only if , , Hidreth (1954) proved that ifthen is ...

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 ...