Category: Acquisition

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Bubble Chart in SAS SGPLOT like Hans Rosing

Robert Allison blogs as the SAS Graph Guy. He recreates using SAS PROC SGPLOT the famous bubble chart from Hans Rosing of Gapminder Institute. Hans shows that life expectancy and income per person have dramatically changed over the years. Because Hans Rosing is a ot the father of visualizations, Robert produces this graph (shown here) and this very cool animation.

I can’t wait to see  Economic Freedom and income per person soon in one of these graphs. My students are trying to do this right now.  At this point in the term they are acquiring two datasets from Heritage on 168 countries, which contain the index of economic freedom for 2013 and 2018. Then they are cleaning and joining them so they can reproduce the following figure and table in SAS PROC SGPLOT for each year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have written about this project in prior terms here. Once they have this data joined and the above figures reproduced then they will move on to the final project for this semester. They will be looking through the 1600 World Development Indicators of the World Bank.  Each team of students will choose 5 and will join that to their data to answer the question:

Does Economic Freedom lead to greater Human Progress?

I may share their results, for now this is some pretty cool graphics from the SAS Graph Guy. 

 

 

 

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A Data Science Book Adoption: Getting Started with Data Science

buy this book

In my undergraduate business and economic analytics course, I have adopted Murtaza Haider‘s excellent text Getting Started with Data Science. I chose it for a lot of reasons. He is an applied econometrician so he relates to the students and me more than many authors. I truly have a very positive first impression. 

Updated: November 7, 2020

On my campus you can hear economics is not part of data science, they don’t do data science, that is, data science belongs to the department of statistics (no to the engineers, to the computer science department, and on and on like that.)  We have come a long way, but years ago, for example, the university launched a major STEM initiative and the organizers kept the economic department out of it even though we ask to be part of it. Of course, when they did their big role out, without our department, they brought in a famous keynote speaker who was … wait for it … an economist.

My department , just launched a Business Data Analytic economics degree in the College of Business Administration at the University of Akron.  We see tech companies filling up their data science teams with economists, many with PhDs. Our department’s placements have been very robust in the analytic world of work. My concern is seeing undergraduates in economics get a start in this field. and Murtaza Haider offers a nice path. 

Dr. Haider, has a Ph.D. in civil engineering, but his record is in economics, specifically in regional and urban, transportation and real-estate, and he is a columnist for the Financial Post. and I can attest to his applied econometrics knowledge based on his fine book which I explore below.

WHAT IS DATA SCIENCE

Haider has a broad idea of what is data science and follows a well-reasoned path on how to do data science. Like my approach to this class, he is heavy into visualizations through tables and graphics and while I would appreciate more design, he makes an effort to teach the communicative power of those visualizations. Also, like me, he is highly skeptical of the value of learning to appease the academic community at the expense of serving the business (non-academic) community where the jobs are. I really appreciate that part of it.

PROBLEM SOLVING AND STORYTELLING

He starts with storytelling. our department recognizes that what our economists do, what they do to bring value is they know how to solve problems and tell stories. Again this is a great first fit. He then moves to Data in a 24/7 connected world. He spends considerable time on data cleaning and data manipulation. Again I like how he wants students to use real data with all of its uncleanliness to solve problems. Chapter 3 focuses on the deliverables part of the job and again I think he is spot on. 

Then through the remaining chapters he first builds up tables, then graphs, and onto advanced tools and techniques. My course will stop somewhere in the neighborhood of chapter 8.

(Update: Chapter 8 begins with the binary and limited dependent variables, and full disclosure my last course did not begin this chapter, we ended in Chapter 7 on Regression). Perhaps the professor in the next course will consider Getting Started in Data Science for Applied Econometrics II.  (Update: Our breakdown in our Business Data Analytics economics degree is that Econometrics I is heavily coding and application-based, while econometrics II is a more mathematical/ theoretical based course with intensive data applications.  It is a walk before you run approach, building up an understanding of analysis and data manipulation first. )

I use a lot of team-based problem-based learning in my instruction and Haider’s guidance through the text is instructing teams how to think through problems to get one of many possible solutions, not highlighting only one solution. In this way, he reinforces both creativity in problem-solving. I like what I read, I wonder what I will think after students and I go through it this term. (Update: I/we liked the text, but did not follow it page by page.  The time constraint of the large data problem began to dominate and crowd out other things, hence why I did not get to Chapter 8, my proposed end. However, because in course 1 which emphasizes data results over theoretical knowledge, I was well pleased.)

PROBLEM ARTICULATION, DATA CLEANING, AND MODEL SPECIFICATION

Another reason I like the book so much is he cites Peter Kennedy, the now passed, research editor for the Journal of Economic Education. Peter was very influential on me and applied econometricians who really want to dig into the data. Most of my course is built around his work and especially around the three pillars of Applied Econometrics.: (1) the ability to articulate a problem, (2) the need to clean data, and (3) to focus deeply on model specification. He argues that most Ph.D. programs fail to teach the applied, allowing their time to focus on theoretical statistics and propertied of inferential statistics. Empirical work is often extra and conducted, even learned, outside of class. I have never taught like that (OK, maybe my first year out of my Ph.D.), but my last 40 years have been a constant striving to make sure my students are prepared for the real as opposed to the academic world. Peter made all the difference bringing my ideas into sharp focus. I like Haider’s work, Getting Started with Data Science, because it is written like someone who also holds the principles put forth by Peter Kennedy in high regard. 

SOFTWARE AGNOSTIC, BUT TOO MUCH STATA AND NOT ENOUGH SAS

On page 12 he gets much credit for saying he does not choose only one software, but includes “R, SPSS, Stata and SAS.” I get the inclusion of SPSS given it is IBM Press, but there is virtually no market for Stata (or SPSS)  in the state of Ohio or 100 miles around my university’s town of Akron, OH. Also, absent is python, which is in heavy use in the job market.  You can see the number of job listings mentioning each program in the chart below. 

I am highly impressed with Haider’s book for my course, but that does not extend to everything in the book. My biggest peeve is his heavy use of Stata. I would prefer a text that highlights the class language (SAS) more and was more sensitive to the market my students will enter.  

Stata is a language adopted by nearly all professional economists in the academic space and in the journal publication space, however, I think this use is misguided when the book is to be jobs facing and not academic facing. While he shows plenty of R, there is no python and no SAS examples. All data sets are available on his useful website, but since SAS can read STATA data sets that isn’t much of a problem.

Numbers for all of indeed.com listings in August 2019: Python, 70K; R 52K; SAS 26K, SPSS 3,789; Stata 1,868

SAS Academic Specialization

Full disclosure, we are a SAS school as part of the SAS Global Academic Program and offer both a joint SAS certificate to our students as well as offering them a path to full certification. 

(Update: The SAS joint certificate program has been rebranded and upgraded to the SAS Academic Specialization and is still a joint partnership between the college or university and SAS, but now in three tiers of responsibilities and benefits. We are at tier 3 and the highest level. Hit the link for more details.) 

We also teach R as well in our forecasting course and students are exposed to multiple other programs over their career including SQL, Tableau, Excel (for small data handling, optimization, and charting/graphics), and more. 

Buy This Book

Most typical econometric textbooks are in the multiple hundreds of dollars (not kidding) and almost none are suitable to really prepare for a job in data science. This book on Amazon is under $30 and is a great practical guide. Is it everything one needs? Of course not, but at the savings from $30 you can afford many more resources.

More SAS Examples

So it is natural given our thrust as a SAS School, that I would have preferred examples in SAS to assist the students. Nevertheless, I accepted the challenge to have students develop the SAS code to replicate examples in the book. This is a great way to avoid too much grading of assignments. Let them read Haider’s examples, say a problem that he states, and then solves with STATA. He presents both question and answer in STATA and my student’s task is to answer the problem in SAS. They can self check and rework until they come to the right numerical answer, and I am left helping only the truly lost.  

Overall, I love the outline of the book. I think it fits with a student’s first exposure to data science and I will know more at the end of this term. I expect to be pleased. (Update: I was.) 

If you are at all in data science and especially if you have a narrow idea that data science is only Machine Learning or big data, you need to spend time with this book, specifically read the first three chapters and I think you will have your eyes opened and a better appreciation of the field of data science.

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The Importance of Data Skepticism – Hate crimes did not rise 17 percent in one year.

The video embeded here by Johan Norberg caught my attention with the title “skewed crime reporting” which I read as “skewed data reporting.” Comparing 2016 and 2017 Department of justice statistics on hate crime, that hate crimes rose 17% in one year. This is reported in the Washington Post, AP news, Vox.com, NBCnews, and the NY Times (and those were only the first 6 hits in my Google search on ‘hate crimes up 17%.’ The Hill.com reported that it was the third year in a row that hate crimes had increased.

Seventeen percent! That is a huge increase and since this is now two back to back increases that seems to say that there is something very wrong these days. One may reasonably expect the data in 2018 to again show an increase. Three years in a row, then possibly four? What are we to do?

Well we can start by not comparing Apples to Oranges

All economics students are taught in their data courses and I hope all who dabble in data analysis and data science are as well, to understand the data generating process (DGP) of the data? What is it and how reliable is it. One would think it is great and useful data because is seems comprehensive and is government data published by the Department of Justice data on the fbi.gov website at 2017 Hate Crime Statistics and 2016 Hate Crime Statistics. It’s governmental data, we do not have to be concerned, correct? In this case there is every reason to be skeptical. See first two paragraphs by the FBI UCR Hate Crime Summary, specifically the changing base of the numbers and the non estimation of hate crimes in an area that does not report. I was rejoicing in the fact that the FBI did not quote the 17% increase, but was disappointed to find that they did. I now hope it was not the careful data professionals, but the misinterpretation of a press officer. Why disappointed? Read on.

I learned my data / statistical skepticism from a 1954 book by Darrell Huff called How to Lie with Statistics and have required it in nearly every data class I have taught. So simple, and so devious, most are simple misrepresentation of the facts. You can’t have your own facts, but your manipulation or interpretation may be nonfactual and faulty. In the data course in which I taught last fall I required a free download by Cathy O’Neil On Being a Data Skeptic. And there are other fine resources, but to have my students first distrust anything about data is quite the goal.

Cathy O’Neil’s author page can be found here. To hear about her book Weapons of Math Destruction, listen in to her conversation with Russ Roberts (@econtalker) at Econ Talk.

All economic students are cautioned or should be cautioned to be skeptical with all data sources, understanding the DGP, but also looking for the year to year changes in methods or wording or scope or instructions. I did not look for, nor would I expect to find a set of instructions sent out with the 2017 survey to reporting agencies to pay particular interest to this or that differently than in 2016, but if I were to analyzing this data I should. Some EDA methods are advisable for economists, (those that inform the researcher, but not those that purport to find truth from data, the latter introducing the inherent bias that correlation is causation), but, alas, I suspect even that would reveal little here. This problem is more fundamental, it is in the base.

Agencies report the hate crimes. Is it only a 10.7 percent increase?

Each year’s data is assembled from the reporting agencies in their sample and that is the problem. The number of agencies between 2016 and 2017 rose by 5.9%, 895 additional agencies in the sample. However, agencies that reported at least one hate crime rose from 1776 to 2040, 14.6 percent increase, near the 17 percent increase in hate crimes. So did hate crimes increase significantly, or was it just because more new agencies join the reporting network? The latter casts doubt on the former reliability.

year No. of
agencies		 No. of
agencies
reporting hate
crimes		 No. of
hate
crimes
reported		 No. of
hate
crimes
per
agency		 No. of
hate
crimes
per
agency
that
reported
hate
crimes		 Source of Data
2016 15,254 1776 6121 0.401 3.45 https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016 
2017 16,149 2040 7175 0.444 3.52 https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017
change  895 264 1,054 0.043 0.071
Percent
change		 5.9% 14.9% 17.2% 10.7% 2.0%

To examine that is beyond this blog post, but I would start with restricting the sample 16,149 agencies in 2017 to only those 15,254 that reported in 2016. In those 15,254 areas by how much is hate crimes increased? I bet it wouldn’t be 17%. in the table I estimate the increase of hate crime to be 10.7%, but I am not comfortable with that measure either.

Not all agencies report hate crimes, perhaps it is only a 2 percent increase.

I every agency that reported for the first time reported just one crime each it accounts for almost the entire increase suggests Johan Norberg quoting or at least referencing Robby Soave in reason.com. So I am led to a different way of thinking about whether hate crimes have increased. What if we took only those 1,776 agencies in 2016 that actually reported hate crimes and then looked at only those agencies in 2017 to see what they report. Again that is beyond this blog entry, but as a crude proxy, lets compare the agencies that reported hate crimes in 2016 with the 2,040 agencies that reported in 2017. What do we find? in 2016 there were 3.44 hate crimes reported on average by the 1,776 agencies which rose to 3.52 hate crimes reported on average in 2017 by the 2,040 agencies which suggests that hate crimes rose by 2 percent, not 10 percent and certainly not 17.

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Susan Athey on the Impact of Machine Learning on Econometrics and Economics (part 2)

I posted Susan Athey’s 2019 Luncheon address to the AEA and AFA in part 1 of this post.  (See here for her address).

Now, in part 2, I post details on the continuing education Course on Machine Learning and Econometrics from 2018 featuring the joint efforts of Susan Athey and Guido Imbens.

It relates to the basis for this blog where I advocate for economists in Data Science roles. As a crude overview, ML uses many of the techniques known by all econometricians and has grown out of data mining and exploratory data analysis, long avoided by economists precisely because such methods lead to in the words of Jan Kmenta “beating the data until it confesses.” ML also makes use of AI type methods that started with brute force methods noting that the computer can be set lose on a data set and in a brutish way try all possible models and predictions seeking a best statistical fit, but not necessarily the best economic fit since the methods ignore both causality and the ability to interpret the results with a good explanation.  

Economists historically have focused on models that are causal and provide the ability to focus on the explanation, the the ability to say why. Their model techniques are designed to test economic hypotheses about the problem and not just to get a good fit. 

To say we have discussed historically the opposite ends of a fair coin by setting up the effect of X–>y is not too far off. ML focuses on y and econometrics focus on X. The future is focusing on both, the need to focus good algos on what is y and the critical understanding of “why” which is the understanding of the importance of X.  

This course offered by the American Economic Association just about one year ago, represents the state of the art of the merger of ML and econometrics.  I offer it here (although you can go directly to the AEA website) so more can explore how economists need to incorporate the lessons of ML and of econometrics and help produce even stronger data science professionals. 

AEA Continuing Education Short Course: Machine Learning and Econometrics, Jan 2018

Course Presenters

Susan Athey is the Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. She received her bachelor’s degree from Duke University and her PhD from Stanford. She previously taught at the economics departments at MIT, Stanford and Harvard. Her current research focuses on the  intersection of econometrics and machine learning.  As one of the first “tech economists,” she served as consulting chief economist for Microsoft Corporation for six years.

Guido Imbens is Professor of Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. After graduating from Brown University Guido taught at Harvard University, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. He joined the GSB in 2012. Imbens specializes in econometrics, and in particular methods for drawing causal inferences. Guido Imbens is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Guido Imbens has taught in the continuing education program previously in 2009 and 2012.

Two day course in nine parts - Machine Learning and Econometrics, Jan 2018

 Materials:

Course Materials (will attach to your Google Drive)

The syllabus is included in the course materials and carries links to 4 pages of readings which are copied and linked to the source articles below.

Webcasts:

View Part 1 – Sunday 4.00-6.00pm: Introduction to Machine Learning Concepts 

(a) S. Athey (2018, January) “The Impact of Machine Learning on Economics,” Sections 1-2. 

(b) H. R. Varian (2014) “Big data: New tricks for econometrics.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28 (2):3-27.

(c) S. Mullainathan and J. Spiess (2017) “Machine learning: an applied econometric approach” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2):87-106  

View Part 2 – Monday 8.15-9.45am: Prediction Policy Problems

(a) S. Athey (2018, January) “The Impact of Machine Learning on Economics,” Section   3. 

(b) S. Mullainathan and J. Spiess (2017) “Machine learning: an applied econometric approach.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2):87-106. 

 

View Part 3 – Monday 10.00-11.45am: Causal Inference: Average Treatment Effects

(a) S. Athey (2018, January) “The Impact of Machine Learning on Economics,” Section 4.0, 4.1. 

(b) A. Belloni, V. Chernozhukov, and C. Hansen (2014) “High-dimensional methods and inference on structural and treatment effects.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28(2):29-50. 

(c) V. Chernozhukov, D. Chetverikov, M. Demirer, E. Duo, C. Hansen, W. Newey, and J. Robins (2017, December) “Double/Debiased Machine Learning for Treatment and Causal Parameters.” 

(d) S. Athey, G. Imbens, and S.Wager (2016) “Estimating Average Treatment Effects: Supplementary Analyses and Remaining Challenges.”  Forthcoming, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society-Series B.

View Part 4 – Monday 12.45-2.15pm: Causal Inference: Heterogeneous Treatment Effects

(a) S. Athey (2018, January) “The Impact of Machine Learning on Economics,” Section 4.2. 

(b) S. Athey, G. Imbens (2016) “Recursive partitioning for heterogeneous causal effects.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(27), 7353-7360.

View Part 5 – Monday 2.30-4.00pm: Causal Inference: Heterogeneous Treatment E ects, Supplementary Analysis

(a) S. Athey (2018, January) “The Impact of Machine Learning on Economics,” Section 4.2, 4.4. 

(b) S. Athey, and G. Imbens (2017) “The State of Applied Econometrics: Causality and Policy Evaluation,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol 31(2):3-32.

(c) S. Wager and S. Athey (2017) “Estimation and inference of heterogeneous treatment effects using random forests.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 

(d) S. Athey, Tibshirani, J., and S.Wager (2017, July) “Generalized Random Forests“

(e) S. Athey, and Imbens, G. (2015) “A measure of robustness to misspeci cation.” The American Economic Review, 105(5), 476-480.

View Part 6 – Monday 4.15-5.15pm: Causal Inference: Optimal Policies and Bandits

(a) S. Athey. (2018, January) “The Impact of Machine Learning on Economics,”
Section 4.3. 

(b) S. Athey and S. Wager (2017) “Efficient Policy Learning.”

(c) M. Dudik, D. Erhan, J. Langford, and L. Li, (2014) “Doubly Robust Policy
Evaluation and Optimization” Statistical Science, Vol 29(4):485-511.

(d) S. Scott (2010), “A modern Bayesian look at the multi-armed bandit,” Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry, vol 26(6):639-658.

(e) M. Dimakopoulou, S. Athey, and G. Imbens (2017). “Estimation Considerations in Contextual Bandits.” 

View Part 7 – Tuesday 8.00-9.15am: Deep Learning Methods

(a) Y. LeCun, Y. Bengio and G. Hinton, (2015) “Deep learning” Nature, Vol. 521(7553): 436-444.

(b) I. Goodfellow, Y. Bengio, and A. Courville (2016) “Deep Learning.” MIT Press.

(c) J. Hartford, G. Lewis, K. Leyton-Brown, and M. Taddy (2016) Counterfactual
Prediction with Deep Instrumental Variables Networks.” 

View Part 8 – Tuesday 9.30-10.45am: Classi cation

(a) L. Breiman, J. Friedman, C. J. Stone R. A. Olshen (1984) “Classi cation and
regression trees,” CRC press.

(b) I. Goodfellow, Y. Bengio, and A. Courville (2016) \Deep Learning.” MIT Press.

View Part 9 – Tuesday 11.00am-12.00pm: Matrix Completion Methods for Causal Panel Data Models

(a) S. Athey, M. Bayati, N. Doudchenko, G. Imbens, and K. Khosravi (2017) “Matrix Completion Methods for Causal Panel Data Models.” 

(b) J. Bai (2009), “Panel data models with interactive fi xed effects.” Econometrica, 77(4): 1229{1279.

(c) E. Candes and B. Recht (2009) “Exact matrix completion via convex optimization.” Foundations of Computational Mathematics, 9(6):717-730.