Exponential Smoothing is an old technique, but it can perform extremely well on real time series, as discussed in Hyndman, Koehler, Ord & Snyder (2008)), when Gardner (2005) appeared, many believed that exponential smoothing should be disregarded because it was either a special case of ARIMA modeling or an ad hoc procedure with no statistical rationale. As McKenzie (1985) observed, this opinion was expressed in numerous references to my paper. Since…
There are important discussions nowadays about data modeling, to choose between the “two cultures” (as mentioned in Breiman (2001)), i.e. either econometrics models or machine/statistical learning models. We did discuss this issue recently in Econométrie et Machine Learning (so far only in French) with Emmanuel Flachaire and Antoine Ly. One argument often used by econometricians is the interpretability of econometric models. Or at least the attempt to get an interpretable…
Last week, I’ve been going through my CD collection, trying to find records I haven’t been listing for a while. And I got the feeling that music I listen to nowadays is slower than the one I was listening to in my 20’s. I was wondering if that was an age issue, or it was simply the fact that music in the 90s was “faster” than the one released in…
To explain the “optimal transport” problem, we usually start with Gaspard Monge’s “Mémoire sur la théorie des déblais et des remblais“, where the the problem of transporting a given distribution of matter (a pile of sand for instance) into another (an excavation for instance). This problem is usually formulated using distributions, and we seek the “optimal” transport from one distribution to the other one. The formulation, in the context of…
In demography, we like to use life tables to estimate the probability that someone born in 1945 (say) is still alive nowadays. But another interesting quantity might be the probability that someone alive in 1945 is still alive nowadays. The main difference is that we do not know when that person, alive in 1945, was born. Someone who was old in 1945 is very unlikely still alive in 2017. To compute…
There are now more than 10,000 R packages available from CRAN, much more if you include those available only on github. So, to be honest, it become difficult to know all of them. But sometimes, you discover a nice function in one of them, and that is really awesome. Consider for instance some (standard) censored lifetime data, n=10000 idx=sample(1:4,size=n,replace=TRUE) pd=LETTERS[idx] lambda=1+(idx-1)/3 t=rexp(n,lambda) x=rexp(n) c=t>x y=pmin(t,x) df=data.frame(time=y,status=c,product=pd) (yes, I will generate…
This morning, I discovered an interesting statistic, America Has Been At War 93% of the Time – 222 Out of 239 Years – Since 1776, i.e. the U.S. has only been at peace for less than 20 years total since its birth. I wanted to check, get a better understanding and look at other countries in the world. As always, we can try to extract information from wikipedia, since there are…
