Solving complex problems

sarraf — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 06:56:24 +0000

For every complex problem there is a simple solution, and it is wrong.

~ H.L. Menken

Pattern recognition

sarraf — Sat, 18 May 2013 06:54:10 +0000

Graphical display of data helps to form preliminary hypothesis, observe patterns, etc. However, one should be careful in staring too long at a graph. In the words of Carl Sagan,

Humans are good, she knew, at discerning subtle patterns that are really there, but equally so at imagining them when they are altogether absent

A trend is a trend

sarraf — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 05:30:52 +0000

A trend is a trend, is a trend, but the question is, will it bend? Will it alter its course, through some unforeseen force and come to a premature end?

~Sir Alec Carincross

One of the Britain's most distinguished economists and a former chief economic advisor to the British government. (Extracted from J. Johnston and J. DiNardo: Econometric Methods, McGraw-Hill, 2007)

Summarizing data

sarraf — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 05:53:09 +0000

This post is specific to the use of the

Economists' search for "truth" has over the years given rise to the view that economists are people searching in a dark room for a non-existent black cat; econometricians are regularly accused of finding one.

~ Kennedy (1992)

The hammer and the nail: v2

sarraf — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 06:25:00 +0000

I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
~ Abraham Kaplan, 1964, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
~ Abraham H. Maslow, 1962, Toward a Psychology of Being

Citations

Visualizing DBT and RH in Ahmedabad. Part 1

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 07:10:39 +0000

This series of posts explores different ways of visualizing the Dry Bulb Temperature (DBT) and Relative Humidity (RH) for a typical year using TMY2 (check) data. These are executed in R (link). It can serve as a template to visualize other time series data.

Once this series is over, I intend to focus on visualizing cyclical data. More on that later

Metaphors and truth

sarraf — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 03:31:00 +0000

Econometric models are metaphors providing different windows on a complex and bewildering reality
~Pesaran (1988)

"Truth" is really nothing more than a "correspondence" with the facts, and an important role for the econometrics is to articulate what constitutes a satisfactory degree of correspondence
~Poirier (1988)

source: Kennedy (1992)

The right model?

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:50:00 +0000

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.

Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.