Category Archives: Google Big Data tools

Hal Varian and the “New” Predictive Techniques

Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics is, for my money, one of the best discussions of techniques like classification and regression trees, random forests, and penalized  regression (such as lasso, lars, and elastic nets) that can be found.

Varian, pictured aove, is emeritus professor in the School of Information, the Haas School of Business, and the Department of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Varian retired from full-time appointments at Berkeley to become Chief Economist at Google.

He also is among the elite academics publishing in the area of forecasting according to IDEAS!.

Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics, as its title suggests, uses the wealth of data now being generated (Google is a good example) as a pretext for promoting techniques that are more well-known in machine learning circles, than in econometrics or standard statistics, at least as understood by economists.

First, the sheer size of the data involved may require more sophisticated 18 data manipulation tools. Second, we may have more potential predictors than appropriate for estimation, so we need to do some kind of variable selection. Third, large data sets may allow for more flexible relationships than simple linear models. Machine learning techniques such as decision trees, support vector machines, neural nets, deep learning and so on may allow for more effective ways to model complex relationships.

He handles the definitional stuff deftly, which is good, since there is not standardization of terms yet in this rapidly evolving field of data science or predictive analytics, whatever you want to call it.

Thus, “NoSQL” databases are

sometimes interpreted as meaning “not only SQL.” NoSQL databases are more primitive than SQL databases in terms of data manipulation capabilities but can handle larger amounts of data.

The essay emphasizes out-of-sample prediction and presents a nice discussion of k-fold cross validation.

1. Divide the data into k roughly equal subsets and label them by s =1; : : : ; k. Start with subset s = 1.

2. Pick a value for the tuning parameter.

3. Fit your model using the k -1 subsets other than subset s.

4. Predict for subset s and measure the associated loss.

5. Stop if s = k, otherwise increment s by 1 and go to step 2.

Common choices for k are 10, 5, and the sample size minus 1 (“leave one out”). After cross validation, you end up with k values of the tuning parameter and the associated loss which you can then examine to choose an appropriate value for the tuning parameter. Even if there is no tuning parameter, it is useful to use cross validation to report goodness-of-t measures since it measures out-of-sample performance which is what is typically of interest.

Varian remarks that Test-train and cross validation, are very commonly used in machine learning and, in my view, should be used much more in economics, particularly when working with large datasets

But this essay is by no means methodological, and presents several nice worked examples, showing how, for example, regression trees can outperform logistic regression in analyzing survivors of the sinking of the Titanic – the luxury ship, and how several of these methods lead to different imputations of significance to the race factor in the Boston Housing Study.

The essay also presents easy and good discussions of bootstrapping, bagging, boosting, and random forests, among the leading examples of “new” techniques – new to economists.

For the statistics wonks, geeks, and enthusiasts among readers, here is a YouTube presentation of the paper cited above with extra detail.