There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

This paper proposes a very tractable approach to modeling changes in regime. The parameters of an autoregression are viewed as the outcome of a discrete-state Markov process. For example, the mean growth rate of a nonstationary series may be subject to occasional, discrete shifts. The econometrician is presumed not to observe these shifts directly, but instead must draw probabilistic inference about whether and when they may have occurred based on the observed behavior of the series. The paper presents an algorithm for drawing such probabilistic inference in the form of a nonlinear iterative filter

A New Approach to the Economic Analysis of Nonstationary Time Series and the Business Cycle.

Today's Web-enabled deluge of electronic data calls for automated methods of data analysis. Machine learning provides these, developing methods that can automatically detect patterns in data and then use the uncovered patterns to predict future data. This textbook offers a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to the field of machine learning, based on a unified, probabilistic approach. The coverage combines breadth and depth, offering necessary background material on such topics as probability, optimization, and linear algebra as well as discussion of recent developments in the field, including conditional random fields, L1 regularization, and deep learning. The book is written in an informal, accessible style, complete with pseudo-code for the most important algorithms. All topics are copiously illustrated with color images and worked examples drawn from such application domains as biology, text processing, computer vision, and robotics. Rather than providing a cookbook of different heuristic methods, the book stresses a principled model-based approach, often using the language of graphical models to specify models in a concise and intuitive way. Almost all the models described have been implemented in a MATLAB software package--PMTK (probabilistic modeling toolkit)--that is freely available online. The book is suitable for upper-level undergraduates with an introductory-level college math background and beginning graduate students.

Machine Learning : A Probabilistic Perspective

Forecasting with artificial neural networks: the state of the art

Recurrence plots for the analysis of complex systems

Political economy: a personal interpretation and an overview Norman J. Schofield Part I. Perspectives on Political Economy: 1. Political ideology, communication, and community Melvin J. Hinich and Michael C. Munger 2. Implementation and enforcement in institutional modeling Leonid Hurwicz 3. Toward a theory of institutional change Douglas C. North 4. The development of contemporary political theory Peter C. Ordeshook Part II. Representation and Voting: 5. Proportional representation, approval voting, and coalitionally straightforward elections Roger B. Myerson 6. Party competition in a spatial model of coalition Norman J. Schofield 7. Some foundations for empirical study in the Euclidean spatial model of social choice Craig A. Tovey Part III. Political Institutions: 8. Communications in institutions: efficiency in a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma with hidden information Randall L. Calvert 9. The courts and slavery in the United States: property rights and credible commitment John N. Drobak 10. On the pervasiveness of sophisticated sincerity Tim Groseclose and Keith Krehbiel 11. Initial versus continuing proposal power in legislative seniority systems Richard D. McKelvey and Raymond Riezman Part IV. Political Competition: 12. Adverse selection and moral hazard in a repeated elections model Jeffrey S. Banks and Rangarajan K. Sundaram 13. Campaign contributions and party-candidate competition in services and policies David P. Baron and Jongryn Mo 14. Polarization, incumbency, and the personal vote John Londregan and Thomas Romer 15. Credibility and the responsiveness of direct legislation Part V. Information Acquisition by Government: 16. Information acquisition and orthogonal argument David Austen-Smith 17. A welfare analysis of political action Susanne Lohmann Part VI. Government Behaviouor 18. Monetary policy and credibility under exact monetary aggregation William A. Barnett 19. A general equilibrium model with endogenous government behaviour Eric Drissen and Frans Van Winden.

Political economy : institutions, competition, and representation : proceedings of the seventh International Symposium in Economic Theory and Econometrics

Developing a marketing information system involves a variety of rather unique statistical problems; partial solutions are available for some of these problems, while no formal solutions are now available for others. For example, such problems face a group which is responsible fur keeping management of a major petroleum company apprised of movements in competitors’ prices for a wide array of products. Several types of data flow in at different intervals — daily, weekly, and monthly. Some data are reported from within the firm, others come from commercial data collection sources and still others from numerous government agencies. The data inputs are subject to various reporting errors and distortions which might be considered random error or “noise”. Prices in these markets may shift discretely rather than drifting up and down, and there may be a substantial time lag between a de facto change in price by one competitor and a public announcement that such a change has taken place. Tracking these price series for evidence of changes in competitive conditions is thus a major function of the information system.

Detecting “Small” Mean Shifts in Time Series

We model correlated voter-candidate issue data within the framework of the Enelow-Hinich spatial model of predictive dimensions. The empirical consequences of this model of the issue data are surprising and allow for an indirect test of the Enelow-Hinich spatial model. The central prediction of the correlated data model we construct, which depends critically on the underlying spatial model, is tested with issue data from the 1980 NES pre-election interview. The test results are highly supportive of the model's predictions. We conclude both that the spatial model of predictive dimensions is empirically supported and that candidate spatial locations estimated by the model are not an artifact of correlated voter-candidate issue data.

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A test of the predictive dimensions model in spatial voting theory

Canada is one nation, but it is in many ways two communities, one Francophone and the other Anglophone. We employ a formal model of “ideology” and analyze how nationality is constructed in people's minds. The magnitude of the changes in expressed “preferences” in terms of ideology depends on the salience of the new issue, the extent to which it confirms with the existing ideological cleavage, and the difference between the perceived status quo on the new dimension and the voter's most preferred alternative. Using data from the 1993 Canadian National Election Study, we consider the relative importance of different policy dimensions in explaining voting decisions among educated Canadians. The issue of Quebec sovereignty, alone, is shown to have significant power for predicting vote choice. A plausible explanation, confirmed here by regression analysis, is that Quebec sovereignty “stands” for other issues in voters' conception of Canadian politics.

Melvin J. Hinich

Papers

Political economy : institutions, competition, and representation : proceedings of the seventh International Symposium in Economic Theory and Econometrics

Detecting “Small” Mean Shifts in Time Series

A test of the predictive dimensions model in spatial voting theory

Ideology and the construction of nationality: The Canadian elections of 1993

Has Chaos been Discovered with Economic Data