Hal Varian

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Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics1

Hal R. Varian2

June 20133Revised: February 2, 20144

Abstract5

Nowadays computers are in the middle of most economic transactions.6

These computer-mediated transactions generate huge amounts of7

data, and new tools can be used to manipulate and analyze this data.8

This essay offers a brief introduction to some of these tools and meth-9

ods.10

Computers are now involved in many economic transactions and can cap-11

ture data associated with these transactions, which can then be manipulated12

and analyzed. Conventional statistical and econometric techniques such as13

regression often work well but there are issues unique to big data sets that14

may require different tools.15

First, the sheer size of the data involved may require more powerful data16

manipulation tools. Second, we may have more potential predictors than17

appropriate for estimation, so we need to do some kind of variable selection.18

Third, large data sets may allow for more flexible relationships than simple19

Hal Varian is Chief Economist, Google Inc., Mountain View, California, and Emeritus

Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, California. Thanks to Jeffrey

Oldham, Tom Zhang, Rob On, Pierre Grinspan, Jerry Friedman, Art Owen, Steve Scott,

Bo Cowgill, Brock Noland, Daniel Stonehill, Robert Snedegar, Gary King, the editors of

this journal for comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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linear models. Machine learning techniques such as decision trees, support20

vector machines, neural nets, deep learning and so on may allow for more21

effective ways to model complex relationships.22

In this essay I will describe a few of these tools for manipulating and an-23

alyzing big data. I believe that these methods have a lot to offer and should24

be more widely known and used by economists. In fact, my standard advice25

to graduate students these days is go to the computer science department26

and take a class in machine learning. There have been very fruitful collabo-27

rations between computer scientists and statisticians in the last decade or so,28

and I expect collaborations between computer scientists and econometricians29

will also be productive in the future.30

1 Tools to manipulate big data31

Economists have historically dealt with data that fits in a spreadsheet, but32

that is changing as new more detailed data becomes available; see Einav33

and Levin [2013] for several examples and discussion. If you have more34

than a million or so rows in a spreadsheet, you probably want to store it in a35

relational database, such as MySQL. Relational databases offer a flexible way36

to store, manipulate and retrieve data using a Structured Query Language37

(SQL) which is easy to learn and very useful for dealing with medium-sized38

data sets.39

However, if you have several gigabytes of data or several million observa-40

tions, standard relational databases become unwieldy. Databases to manage41

data of this size are generically known as NoSQL databases. The term is42

used rather loosely, but is sometimes interpreted as meaning not only SQL.43

NoSQL databases are more primitive than SQL databases in terms of data44

manipulation capabilities but can handle larger amounts of data.45

Due to the rise of computer mediated transactions, many companies have46

found it necessary to develop systems to process billions of transactions per47

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day. For example, according to Sullivan [2012], Google has seen 30 trillion48

URLs, crawls over 20 billion of those a day, and answers 100 billion search49

queries a month. Analyzing even one days worth of data of this size is50

virtually impossible with conventional databases. The challenge of dealing51

with data sets of this size led to the development of several tools to manage52

and analyze big data.53

A number of these tools are proprietary to Google, but have been de-54

scribed in academic publications in sufficient detail that open-source imple-55

mentations have been developed. Table 1 contains both the Google name56

and the name of related open source tools. Further details can be found in57

the Wikipedia entries associated with the tool names.58

Though these tools can be run on a single computer for learning purposes,59

real applications use large clusters of computers such as those provided by60

Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other cloud computing providers. The ability61

to rent rather than buy data storage and processing has turned what was62

previously a fixed cost of computing into a variable cost and has lowered the63

barriers to entry for working with big data.64

2 Tools to analyze data65

The outcome of the big data processing described above is often a small66

table of data that may be directly human readable or can be loaded into67

an SQL database, a statistics package, or a spreadsheet. If the extracted68

data is still inconveniently large, it is often possible to select a subsample69

for statistical analysis. At Google, for example, I have found that random70

samples on the order of 0.1 percent work fine for analysis of business data.71

Once a dataset has been extracted it is often necessary to do some ex-72

ploratory data analysis along with consistency and data-cleaning tasks. This73

is something of an art which can be learned only by practice, but data clean-74

ing tools such as OpenRefine and DataWrangler can be used to assist in data75

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Google name Analog Description

Google File System Hadoop FileSystem

This system supports files so large thatthey must be distributed across hundredsor even thousands of computers.

Bigtable Cassandra This is a table of data that lives in theGoogle File System. It too can stretch overmany computers.

MapReduce Hadoop This is a system for accessing manipulat-

ing data in large data structures such asBigtables. MapReduce allows you to ac-cess the data in parallel, using hundredsor thousands of machines to extract thedata you are interested in. The query ismapped to the machines and is then ap-plied in parallel to different shards of thedata. The partial calculations are thencombined (reduced) to create the sum-mary table you are interested in.

Sawzall Pig This is a language for creating MapReducejobs.Go None Go is flexible open-source general-purpose

computer language that makes it easier todo parallel data processing.

Dremel, BigQuery Hive, Drill,Impala

This is a tool that allows data queries to bewritten in a simplified form of SQL. WithDremel it is possible to run an SQL queryon a petabtye of data (1000 terabytes) ina few seconds.

Table 1: Tools for manipulating big data.

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cleansing.76

Data analysis in statistics and econometrics can be broken down into four77

categories: 1) prediction, 2) summarization, 3) estimation, and 4) hypothesis78

testing. Machine learning is concerned primarily with prediction; the closely79

related field of data mining is also concerned with summarization, and par-80

ticularly in finding interesting patterns in the data. Econometricians, statis-81

ticians, and data mining specialists are generally looking for insights that82

can be extracted from the data. Machine learning specialists are often pri-83

marily concerned with developing high-performance computer systems that84

can provide useful predictions in the presence of challenging computational85

constraints. Data science, a somewhat newer term, is concerned with both86

prediction and summarization, but also with data manipulation, visualiza-87

tion, and other similar tasks. Note that terminology is not standardized88

in these areas, so these descriptions reflect general usage, not hard-and-fast89

definitions. Other terms used to describe computer assisted data analysis90

include knowledge extraction, information discovery, information harvesting,91

data archaeology, data pattern processing, and exploratory data analysis.92

Much of applied econometrics is concerned with detecting and summariz-93

ing relationships in the data. The most common tool used to for summariza-94

tion is (linear) regression analysis. As we shall see, machine learning offers95

a set of tools that can usefully summarize more various sorts of nonlinear96

relationships in the data. We will focus on these regression-like tools because97

they are the most natural for economic applications.98

In the most general formulation of a statistical prediction problem, we99

are interested in understanding the conditional distribution of some variable100

y given some other variables x= (x1, . . . , xP). If we want a point prediction101

we could use the mean or median of the conditional distribution.102

In machine learning, the x-variables are usually called predictors or103

features. The focus of machine learning is to find some function that104

provides a good prediction of y as a function of x. Historically, most work105

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in machine learning has involved cross-section data where it is natural to106

think of the data being independent and identically distributed (IID) or at107

least independently distributed. The data may be fat, which means lots108

of predictors relative to the number of observations, or tall which means109

lots of observations relative to the number of predictors.110

We typically have some observed data on y and xand we want to compute111

a good prediction of y given new values of x. Usually good means it112

minimizes some loss function such as the sum of squared residuals, mean of113

absolute value of residuals, and so on. Of course, the relevant loss is that114

associated with new out-of-sample observations of x, not the observations115

used to fit the model.116

When confronted with a prediction problem of this sort an economist117

would think immediately of a linear or logistic regression. However, there118

may be better choices, particularly if a lot of data is available. These include119

nonlinear methods such as 1) classification and regression trees (CART), 2)120

random forests, and 3) penalized regression such as LASSO, LARS, and elas-121

tic nets. (There are also other techniques such as neural nets, deep learning,122

and support vector machines which I do not cover in this review.) Much123

more detail about these methods can be found in machine learning texts; an124

excellent treatment is available in Hastie et al. [2009], which can be freely125

downloaded. Additional suggestions for further reading are given at the end126

of this article.127

3 General considerations for prediction128

Our goal with prediction is typically to get good out-of-sample predictions.129

Most of us know from experience that it is all too easy to construct a predictor130

that works well in-sample, but fails miserably out-of-sample. To take a trivial131

example, n linearly independent regressors will fit n observations perfectly132

but will usually have poor out-of-sample performance. Machine learning133

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specialists refer to this phenomenon as the overfitting problem. They use134

three different methods for dealing with this problem.135

First, since simpler models tend to work better for out of sample forecasts,136

machine learning experts have come up with various ways penalize models137

for excessive complexity. In the machine learning world, this is known as138

regularization and we will encounter a some examples later on. Economists139

tend to prefer simpler models for the same reason, but have not been as140

explicit about quantifying complexity costs.141

Second, it is conventional to divide the data into separate sets for the142

purpose of training, testing and validation. You use the training data to143

estimate a model, the validation data to choose your model, and the testing144

data to evaluate how well your chosen model performs. (Often validation145

and testing sets are combined.)146

Third, simpler models tend to generate better out-of-sample forecasts. So147

one way to control overfitting is to impose a cost for excessive complexity; in148

machine learning such a complexity cost is known as a tuning parameter.149

The conventional way to choose a tuning parameter is to use k-fold cross150

validation.151

1. Divide the data into k roughly equal subsets and label them by s =152

1, . . . , k. Start with subset s= 1.153

2. Pick a value for the tuning parameter.154

3. Fit your model using thek1 subsets other than subset s.155

4. Predict for subsetsand measure the associated loss.156

5. Stop ifs= k, otherwise increment sby 1 and go to step 2.157

Common choices for k are 10, 5, and the sample size minus 1 (leave158

one out). After cross validation, you end up with k values of the tuning159

parameter and the associated loss which you can then examine to choose160

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an appropriate value for the tuning parameter. Even if there is no tuning161

parameter, it is useful to use cross validation to report goodness-of-fit mea-162

sures since it measures out-of-sample performance which is generally more163

meaningful than in-sample performance.164

The test-train cycle and cross validation are very commonly used in ma-165

chine learning and, in my view, should be used much more in economics,166

particularly when working with large datasets. For many years, economists167

have reported in-sample goodness-of-fit measures using the excuse that we168

had small datasets. But now that larger datasets have become available,169

there is no reason not to use separate training and testing sets. Cross-170

validation also turns out to be a very useful technique, particularly when171

working with reasonably large data. It is also a much more realistic measure172

of prediction performance than measures commonly used in economics.173

4 Classification and regression trees174

Let us start by considering a discrete variable regression where our goal is to175

predict a 0-1 outcome based on some set of features (what economists would176

call explanatory variables or predictors.) In machine learning this is known as177

a classification problem. A common example would be classifying email into178

spam or not spam based on characteristics of the email. Economists179

would typically use a generalized linear model like a logit or probit for a180

classification problem.181

A quite different way to build a classifier is to use a decision tree. Most182

economists are familiar with decision trees that describe a sequence of de-183

cisions that results in some outcome. A tree classifier has the same general184

form, but the decision at the end of the process is a choice about how to185

classify the observation. The goal is to construct (or grow) a decision tree186

that leads to good out-of-sample predictions.187

Ironically, one of the earliest papers on the automatic construction of de-188

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features predicted actual/total

class 3 died 370/501class 1-2, younger than 16 lived 34/36class 2, older than 16 died 145/233class 1, older than 16 lived 174/276

Table 2: Tree model in rule form.

cision trees was co-authored by an economist (Morgan and Sonquist [1963]).189

However, the technique did not really gain much traction until 20 years later190

in the work of Breiman et al. [1984] and his colleagues. Nowadays this predic-191

tion technique is known as classification and regression trees, or CART.192

To illustrate the use of tree models, I used the R package rpart to find193

a tree that predicts Titanic survivors using just two variables, age and class194

of travel.1 The resulting tree is shown in Figure 1, and the rules depicted195

in the tree are shown in Table 2. The rules fit the data reasonably well,196

misclassifying about 30% of the observations in the testing set.197

This classification can also be depicted in the partition plot shown in198

Figure 2 which shows how the tree divides up the space of age and class199

pairs into rectangular regions. Of course, the partition plot can only be used200

for two variables while a tree representation can handle an arbitrarily large201

number.202

It turns out that there are computationally efficient ways to construct203

classification trees of this sort. These methods generally are restricted to204

binary trees (two branches at each node). They can be used for classifi-205

cation with multiple outcomes (classification trees) , or with continuous206

dependent variables (regression trees.)207

Trees tend to work well for problems where there are important nonlin-208

earities and interactions. As an example, let us continue with the Titanic209

data and create a tree that relates survival to age. In this case, the rule210

generated by the tree is very simple: predict survive if age < 8.5 years.211

1All data and code used in this paper can be found in the online supplement.

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class >= 2.5

age >= 16

class >= 1.5

died

370 / 501

died

145 / 233

lived

174 / 276

lived

34 / 36

yes no

Figure 1: A classification tree for survivors of the Titanic. See text forinterpretation.

0

20

40

60

80

class

age

1st 2nd 3rd

Figure 2: The simple tree model predicts death in shaded region. Whitecircles indicate survival, black crosses indicate death.

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Coefficient Estimate Std Error t value p value

Intercept 0.465 0.0350 13.291 0.000age -0.002 0.001 -1.796 0.072

Table 3: Logistic regression of survival vs age.

We can examine the same data with a logistic regression to estimate the212

probability of survival as a function of age, with results reported in Table 3.213

The tree model suggests that age is an important predictor of survival214

important, while the logistic model says it is barely important. This dis-215

crepancy is explained in Figure 3 where we plot survival rates by age bins.216

Here we see that survival rates for those under 10 years old were elevated217

compared to older passengers, except for the very oldest group. So what218

mattered for survival is not so much age, but whether the passenger was a219

child or elderly. It would be difficult to discover this pattern from a logistic220

regression alone.2221

Trees also handle missing data well. Perlich et al. [2003] examined several222

standard data sets and found that logistic regression is better for smaller223

data sets and tree induction for larger data sets. Interestingly enough, trees224

tend not to work very well if the underlying relationship really is linear,225

but there are hybrid models such as RuleFit (Friedman and Popescu [2005])226

which can incorporate both tree and linear relationships among variables.227

However, even if trees may not improve on predictive accuracy compared to228

linear models, the age example shows that they may reveal aspects of the229

data that are not apparent from a traditional linear modeling approach.230

2It is true that if you knew that there was a nonlinearity in age, you could use age

dummies in the logit model to capture this effect. However the tree formulation made this

nonlinearity immediately apparent.

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10 20 30 40 50 60 70

0.

1

0.

2

0.

3

0.

4

0.

5

0.6

0

.7

age bin

ractons

urv

ve

Figure 3: The figure shows the mean survival rates for different age groupsalong with confidence intervals.

4.1 Pruning trees231

One problem with trees is that they tend to overfit the data. Just as a232

regression with n observations and n variables will give you a good fit in233

sample, a tree with an many branches will also fit the training data well. In234

either case, predictions using new data, such as the test set, could be very235

poor.236

The most common solution to this problem is to prune the tree by237

imposing a cost for complexity. There are various measures of complexity,238

but a common one is the number of terminal nodes (also known as leafs.239

The cost of complexity is a tuning parameter that is chosen to provide the240

best out-of-sample predictions, which is typically measured using the 10-fold241

cross validation procedure mentioned earlier.242

A typical tree estimation session might involve dividing your data into243

ten folds, using nine of the folds to grow a tree with a particular complexity,244

and then predict on the excluded fold. Repeat the estimation with different245

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values of the complexity parameter using other folds and choose the value246

of the complexity parameter that minimizes the out-of-sample classification247

error. (Some researchers recommend being a bit more aggressive and advo-248

cate choosing the complexity parameter that is one standard deviation lower249

than the loss-minimizing value.)250

Of course, in practice, the computer program handles most of these de-251

tails for you. In the examples in this paper I mostly use default choices to252

keep things simple, but in practice these default will often be adjusted by the253

analyst. As with any other statistical procedure, skill, experience and intu-254

ition are helpful in coming up with a good answer. Diagnostics, exploration,255

and experimentation are just as useful with these methods as with regression256

techniques.257

There are many other approaches to creating trees, including some that258

are explicitly statistical in nature. For example, a conditional inference259

tree, or ctree for short, chooses the structure of the tree using a sequence260

of hypothesis tests. The resulting trees tend to need very little pruning.261

(Hothorn et al. [2006]) An example for the Titanic data is shown in Figure 4.262

The first node divides by gender. The second node then divides by class.263

In the right-hand branches, the third node divides by age, and a fourth264

node divides by the number of siblings and spouses aboard. The bins at265

the bottom of the figure show the total number of people in that leaf and a266

graphical depiction of their survival rate. One might summarize this tree by267

the following principle: women and children first . . . particularly if they were268

traveling first class. This simple example again illustrates that classification269

trees can be helpful in summarizing relationships in data, as well as predicting270

outcomes.271

4.2 Economic example: HMDA data272

Munnell et al. [1996] examined mortgage lending in Boston to see if race273

played a significant role in determining who was approved for a mortgage.274

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sexp < 0.001

1

female male

pclass

p < 0.001

2

2 > 2

Node 3 (n = 236)

1

0

0

0.20.4

0.6

0.8

1Node 4 (n = 152)

1

0

0

0.20.4

0.6

0.8

1

pclass

p < 0.001

5

1 > 1

agep = 0.01

6

54 > 54

Node 7 (n = 123)

1

0

0

0.20.4

0.6

0.8

1Node 8 (n = 28)

1

0

0

0.20.4

0.6

0.8

1

agep < 0.001

9

9 > 9

sibspp < 0.001

10

2 > 2

Node 11 (n = 24)

1

0

0

0.20.4

0.6

0.8

1Node 12 (n = 16)

1

0

0

0.20.4

0.6

0.8

1Node 13 (n = 467)

1

0

0

0.20.4

0.6

0.8

1

Figure 4: A ctree for survivors of the Titanic. The black bars indicate fractionof the group that survived.

The primary econometric technique was a logistic regression where race was275

included as one of the predictors. The coefficient on race showed a statis-276

tically significant negative impact on probability of getting a mortgage for277

black applicants. This finding prompted considerable subsequent debate and278

discussion; see Ladd [1998] for an overview.279

Here I examine this question using the tree-based estimators described in280

the previous section. The data consists of 2380 observations of 12 predictors,281

one of which was race. Figure 5 shows a conditional tree estimated using the282

R package party. (For reasons of space, I have omitted variable descriptions283

which are readily available in the online supplement.)284

The tree fits pretty well, misclassifying 228 of the 2380 observations for an285

error rate of 9.6%. By comparison, a simple logistic regression does slightly286

better, misclassifying 225 of the 2380 observations, leading to an error rate287

of 9.5%. As you can see in Figure 5, the most important variable is dmi288

= denied mortgage insurance. This variable alone explains much of the289

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variation in the data. The race variable (black) shows up far down the tree290

and seems to be relatively unimportant.291

dmi

p < 0.001

1

no yes

ccsp < 0.001

2

3 > 3

dirp < 0.001

3

0.431 > 0.431

ccs

p < 0.001

4

1 > 1

Node 5 (n = 1272)

yes

no

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

pbcrp < 0.001

6

yes no

Node 7 (n = 37)

yes

no

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1Node 8 (n = 479)

yes

no

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

mcs

p = 0.011

9

1 > 1

Node 10 (n = 48)

yes

no

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1Node 11 (n = 50)

yes

no

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

pbcrp < 0.001

12

no yes

lvr

p = 0.001

13

0.953 > 0.953

dirp < 0.001

14

0.415 > 0.415

blackp = 0.021

15

no yes

Node 16 (n = 246)

yes

no

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1Node 17 (n = 71)

yes

no

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1Node 18 (n = 36)

yes

no

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1Node 19 (n = 10)

yes

no

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1Node 20 (n = 83)

yes

no

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1Nod

yes

no

Figure 5: HMDA tree. The black bars indicate the fraction of each group

that were denied mortgages. The most important determinant of this is thevariable dmi, denied mortgage insurance.

One way to gauge whether a variable is important is to exclude it from292

the prediction and see what happens. When this is done, it turns out that293

the accuracy of the tree based model doesnt change at all: exactly the same294

cases are misclassified. Of course, it is perfectly possible that there was295

racial discrimination elsewhere in the mortgage process, or that some of the296

variables included are highly correlated with race. But it is noteworthy that297

the tree model produced by standard procedures that omits race fits the298

observed data just as well as a model that includes race.299

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5 Boosting, bagging and bootstrap300

There are several useful ways to improve classifier performance. Interestingly301

enough, the some of these methods work by addingrandomness to the data.302

This seems paradoxical at first, but adding randomness turns out to be a303

helpful way of dealing with the overfitting problem.304

Bootstrap involves choosing (with replacement) a sample of size n from a305

data set of sizento estimate the sampling distribution of some statistic.306

A variation is the mout ofn bootstrap which draws a sample of size307

mfrom a dataset of size n > m.308

Bagging involves averaging across models estimated with several different309

bootstrap samples in order to improve the performance of an estimator.310

Boosting involves repeated estimation where misclassified observations are311

given increasing weight in each repetition. The final estimate is then a312

vote or an average across the repeated estimates.3313

Econometricians are well-acquainted with the bootstrap but rarely use the314

other two methods. Bagging is primarily useful for nonlinear models such315

as trees. (Friedman and Hall [2005].) Boosting tend to improve predictive316

performance of an estimator significantly and can be used for pretty much317

any kind of classifier or regression model, including logits, probits, trees, and318

so on.319

It is also possible to combine these techniques and create a forest of320

trees that can often significantly improve on single-tree methods. Here is a321

rough description of how such random forests work.322

Random forests refers to a technique that uses multiple trees. A typical323

procedure uses the following steps.324

3Boosting is often used with decision trees, where can dramatically improve their pre-

dictive performance.

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1. Choose a bootstrap sample of the observations and start to grow325

a tree.326

2. At each node of the tree, choose a random sample of the predictors327

to make the next decision. Do not prune the trees.328

3. Repeat this process many times to grow a forest of trees329

4. In order to determine the classification of a new observation, have330

each tree make a classification and use a majority vote for the331

final prediction332

This method produces surprisingly good out-of-sample fits, particularly333

with highly nonlinear data. In fact, Howard [2013] claims ensembles of334

decision trees (often known as Random Forests) have been the most successful335

general-purpose algorithm in modern times. He goes on to indicate that336

the algorithm is very simple to understand, and is fast and easy to apply.337

See also Caruana and Niculescu-Mizil [2006] who compare several different338

machine learning algorithms and find that ensembles of trees perform quite339

well. There are a number variations and extensions of the basic ensemble of340

trees model such as Friedmans Stochastic Gradient Boosting (Friedman341

[1999]).342

One defect of random forests is that they are a bit of a black boxthey343

dont offer simple summaries of relationships in the data. As we have seen344

earlier, a single tree can offer some insight about how predictors interact. But345

a forest of a thousand trees cannot be easily interpreted. However, random346

forests can determine which variables are important in predictions in the347

sense of contributing the biggest improvements in prediction accuracy.348

Note that random forests involves quite a bit of randomization; if you349

want to try them out on some data, I strongly suggest choosing a particular350

seed for the random number generator so that your results can be reproduced.351

(See the online supplement for examples.)352

I ran the random forest method on the HMDA data and found that it353

misclassified 223 of the 2380 cases, a small improvement over the logit and354

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the ctree. I also used the importance option in random forests to see how355

the predictors compared. It turned out that dmi was the most important356

predictor and race was second from the bottom which is consistent with the357

ctree analysis.358

6 Variable selection359

Let us return to the familiar world of linear regression and consider the prob-360

lem of variable selection. There are many such methods available, including361

stepwise regression, principal component regression, partial least squares,362

AIC and BIC complexity measures and so on. Castle et al. [2009] describes363

and compares 21 different methods.364

6.1 Lasso and friends365

Here we consider a class of estimators that involves penalized regression.366

Consider a standard multivariate regression model where we predict yt as a367

linear function of a constant, b0, andPpredictor variables. We suppose that368

we have standardized all the (non-constant) predictors so they have mean369

zero and variance one.370

Consider choosing the coefficients (b1, . . . , bP) for these predictor variables

by minimizing the sum of squared residuals plus a penalty term of the form

P

p=1

[(1)|bp|+|bp|2]

This estimation method is calledelastic net regression; it contains three other371

methods as special cases. If there is no penalty term (= 0), this is ordinary372

least squares. If = 1 so that there is only the quadratic constraint, this373

is ridge regression. If = 0 this is called the lasso, an acronym for least374

absolute shrinkage and selection operator.375

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These penalized regressions are classic examples of regularization. In376

this case, the complexity is the number and size of predictors in the model.377

All of these methods tend to shrink the least squares regression coefficients378

towards zero. The lasso and elastic net typically produces regressions where379

some of the variables are set to be exactly zero. Hence this is a relatively380

straightforward way to do variable selection.381

It turns out that these estimators can be computed quite efficiently, so382

doing variable selection on reasonably large problems is computationally fea-383

sible. They also seem to provide good predictions in practice.384

6.2 Spike and slab regression385

Another approach to variable selection that is novel to most economists is386

spike-and-slab regression, a Bayesian technique. Suppose that you have P387

possible predictors in some linear model. Let be a vector of length P388

composed of zeros and ones that indicate whether or not a particular variable389

is included in the regression.390

We start with a Bernoulli prior distribution on ; for example, initially391

we might think that all variables have an equally likely chance of being in392

the regression. Conditional on a variable being in the regression, we specify a393

prior distribution for the regression coefficient associated with that variable.394

For example, we might use a Normal prior with mean 0 and a large variance.395

These two priors are the source of the methods name: the spike is the396

probability of a coefficient being non-zero; the slab is the (diffuse) prior397

describing the values that the coefficient can take on.398

Now we take a draw offrom its prior distribution, which will just be a399

list of variables in the regression. Conditional on this list of included vari-400

ables, we take a draw from the prior distribution for the coefficients. We401

combine these two draws with the likelihood in the usual way which gives402

us a draw from posterior distribution on both probability of inclusion and403

the coefficients. We repeat this process thousands of times using a Markov404

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Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique which give us a table summarizing405

the posterior distribution for (indicating variable inclusion), (the coef-406

ficients), and the associated prediction of y. We can summarize this table407

in a variety of ways. For example, we can compute the average value ofp408

which shows the posterior probability that the variable p is included in the409

regressions.410

6.3 Economic example: growth regressions411

We illustrate these different methods of variable selection using data from412

Sala-i-Martn [1997]. This exercise involved examining a data set of 72 coun-413

ties and 42 variables in order to see which variables appeared to be important414

predictors of economic growth. Sala-i-Martn [1997] computed at all possible415

subsets of regressors of manageable size and used the results to construct416

an importance measure he called CDF(0). Ley and Steel [2009] investigated417

the same question using Bayesian techniques related to, but not identical418

with, spike-and-slab, while Hendry and Krolzig [2004] examined an iterative419

significance test selection method.420

Table 4 shows 10 predictors that were chosen by Sala-i-Martn [1997], Ley421

and Steel [2009], lasso, and spike-and-slab. The table is based on that422

in Ley and Steel [2009] but metrics used are not strictly comparable across423

the various models. The BMA and spike-slab columns are posterior424

probabilities of inclusion; the lasso column is just the ordinal importance425

of the variable with a dash indicating that it was not included in the chosen426

model; and the CDF(0) measure is defined in Sala-i-Martn [1997].427

Thelassoand the Bayesian techniques are very computationally efficient428

and on this ground would likely be preferred to exhaustive search. All 4429

of these variable selection methods give similar results for the first 4 or 5430

variables, after which they diverge. In this particular case, the data set431

appears to be too small to resolve the question of what is important for432

economic growth.433

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predictor BMA CDF(0) lasso spike-slab

GDP level 1960 1.000 1.000 - 0.9992Fraction Confucian 0.995 1.000 6 0.9730Life expectancy 0.946 0.942 5 0.9610Equipment investment 0.757 0.997 1 0.9532Sub-Saharan dummy 0.656 1.000 - 0.5834Fraction Muslim 0.656 1.000 - 0.6590Rule of law 0.516 1.000 - 0.4532Open economy 0.502 1.000 3 0.5736Degree of Capitalism 0.471 0.987 - 0.4230Fraction Protestant 0.461 0.966 - 0.3798

Table 4: Comparing variable selection algorithms. See text for discussion.

7 Time series434

The machine learning techniques described up until now are generally applied435

to cross-sectional data where independently distributed data is a plausible436

assumption. However, there are also techniques that work with time series.437

Here we describe an estimation method which we call Bayesian Structural438

Time Series (BSTS) that seems to work well for variable selection problems439

in time series applications.440Our research in this area was motivated by Google Trends data which441

provides an index of the volume of Google queries on specific terms. One442

might expect that queries on [file for unemployment] might be predictive443

of the actual rate of filings for initial claims, or that queries on [Orlando444

vacation] might be predictive of actual visits to Orlando. Indeed, Choi and445

Varian [2009, 2012], Goel et al. [2010], Carriere-Swallow and Labbe [2011],446

McLaren and Shanbhoge [2011], Arola and Galan [2012], Hellerstein and447

Middeldorp [2012] and many others have shown that Google queries do have448

significant short-term predictive power for various economic metrics.449

The challenge is that there are billions of queries so it is hard to determine450

exactly which queries are the most predictive for a particular purpose. Google451

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Trends classifies the queries into categories, which helps a little, but even then452

we have hundreds of categories as possible predictors so that overfitting and453

spurious correlation are a serious concern. BSTS is designed to address these454

issues. We offer a very brief description here; more details are available in455

Scott and Varian [2012a,b].456

Consider a classic time series model with constantlevel, linear time trend,457

and regressor components:458

yt= +bt+xt+et.459

The local linear trend is a stochastic generalization of this model where460

the level and time trend can vary through time.461

Observation: yt= t+zt+e1t = level + regression462

State 1: t= t1+bt1+e2t = random walk + trend463

State 2: zt= xt = regression464

State 3: bt= bt1+e3t = random walk for trend465

It is easy to add an additional state variable for seasonality if that is ap-466propriate. The parameters to estimate are the regression coefficients and467

the variances of (eit) for i = 1, . . . , 3. We can then use these estimates to468

construct the optimal forecast based on techniques drawn from the literature469

on Kalman filters.470

For the regression we use the spike-and-slab variable choice mechanism471

described above. A draw from the posterior distribution now involves a draw472

of variances of (e1t, e2t), a draw of the vector that indicates which vari-473

ables are in the regression, and a draw of the regression coefficients for the474

included variables. The draws oft, bt, and can be used to construct esti-475

mates ofyt and forecasts for yt+1. We end up with an (estimated) posterior476

distribution for each parameter of interest. If we seek a point prediction, we477

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can average over these draws, which is essentially a form of Bayesian model478

averaging.479

As an example, consider the non-seasonally adjusted data for new homes480

sold in the U.S. (HSN1FNSA) from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Economic481

Data. This time series can be submitted to Google Correlate, which then482

returns the 100 queries that are the most highly correlated with the series.483

We feed that data into the BSTS system which identifies the predictors with484

the largest posterior probabilities of appearing in the housing regression are485

shown in Figure 6. In these figures, black bars indicate a negative relation-486

ship and white bars indicate a positive relationship. Two predictors, [oldies487

lyrics] and [www.mail2web] appear to be spurious so we remove them and488

re-estimate, yielding the results in Figure 7.489

The fit is shown in Figure 8 which shows the incremental contribution490

of the trend, seasonal, and two two of the regressors. Even with only two491

predictors, queries on [appreciate rate] and queries on [irs 1031], we get a492

pretty good fit.4493

real.estate.appraisal

www.mail2web.com

irs.1031

real.estate.purchase

oldies.lyrics

appreciation.rate

Inclusion Probability

0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0

Figure 6: Initial predictors.

selling.real.estate

real.estate.appraisal

X80.20.mortgage

estate.appraisal

real.estate.purchase

century.21.realtors

irs.1031

appreciation.rate

Inclusion Probability

0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0

Figure 7: Final predictors.

4IRS section 1031 has to do with deferring capital gains on certain sorts of property

exchange.

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Figure 8: Incremental plots. The plots show the impact of the trend, sea-sonal, and a few individual regressors. The residuals are shown on the bot-tom.

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8 Econometrics and machine learning494

There are a number of areas where there would be opportunities for fruitful495

collaboration between econometrics and machine learning. I mentioned above496

that most machine learning uses IID data. However, the BSTS model shows497

that some of these techniques can be adopted for time series models. It is498

also be possible to use machine learning techniques to look at panel data and499

there has been some work in this direction.500

However, the most important area for collaboration involves causal infer-501

ence. Econometricians have developed several tools for causal inference such502

as instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, difference-in-differences503

and various forms of natural and designed experiments. (Angrist and Krueger504

[2001].) Machine learning work has, for the most part, dealt with pure pre-505

diction. In a way this is ironic, since theoretical computer scientists, such506

as Pearl [2009a,b] have made significant contributions to causal modeling.507

However, it appears that these theoretical advances have not as yet been508

incorporated into machine learning practice to a significant degree.509

8.1 Causality and prediction510

As economists know well there is a big difference between correlation and511

causation. A classic example: there are often more police in precincts with512

high crime, but that does not imply that increasing the number of police in513

a precinct would increase crime.514

The machine learning models we have described so far have been entirely515

about prediction. If our data was generated by policymakers who assigned516

police to areas with high crime, then the observed relationship between police517

and crime rates could be highly predictive for thehistorical

data, but not518

useful in predicting the causal impact of explicitly assigningadditional police519

to a precinct.520

To enlarge on this point, let us consider an experiment (natural or de-521

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signed) that attempts to estimate the impact of some policy, such as adding522

police to precincts. There are two critical questions.523

How will police be assigned to precincts in both the experiment and524

the policy implementation? Possible assignment rules could be 1) ran-525

dom, 2) based on perceived need, 3) based on cost of providing service,526

4) based on resident requests, 5) based on a formula or set of rules,527

6) based on asking for volunteers, and so on. Ideally the assignment528

procedure in the experiment will be similar to that used in the policy.529

Developing accurate predictions about which precincts will receive ad-530

ditional police under the proposed policy based on the experimental531

data can clearly be helpful in predicting the expected impact of the532

policy.533

What will be the impact of these additional police in both the exper-534

iment and the policy? As Rubin [1974] and many subsequent authors535

have emphasized, when we want to estimate the causalimpact of some536

treatment we need to compare the outcome with the intervention to537

what would have happened without the intervention. But this coun-538

terfactual cannot be observed, so it must be predicted by some model.539

The better predictive model you have for the counterfactual, the bet-540

ter you will be able to estimate the causal effect, an observation that541

is true for both pure experiments and natural experiments.542

So even though a predictive model will not necessarily allow one to con-543

clude anything about causality by itself, such models may help in estimating544

the causal impact of an intervention when it occurs.545

To state this in a slightly more formal way, consider the identity from546

Angrist and Pischke [2008], page 11:547

observed difference in outcome = average treatment effect on the treated

+ selection bias

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If you want to model the average treatment effect as a function of other vari-548

ables, you will usually need to model both the observed difference in outcome549

and the selection bias. The better your predictive model for those compo-550

nents, the better predictions you can make about the average treatment ef-551

fect. Of course, if you have a true randomized treatment-control experiment,552

selection bias goes away and those treated are an unbiased random sample553

of the population.554

To illustrate these points, let us consider the thorny problem of estimat-555

ing the causal effect of advertising on sales. (Lewis and Rao [2013].) The556

difficulty is that there are many confounding variables, such as seasonality or557

weather, that cause both increased ad exposures and increased purchases by558

consumers. For example, consider the (probably apocryphal) story about an559

advertising manager who was asked why he thought his ads were effective.560

Look at this chart, he said. Every December I increase my ad spend and,561

sure enough, purchases go up. Of course, in this case seasonality can be562

included in the model. However, generally there will be other confounding563

variables that affect both exposure to ads and the propensity of purchase,564

which makes causal interpretations of observed relationships problematic.565

The ideal way to estimate advertising effectiveness is, of course, to run a566

controlled experiment. In this case the control group provides an estimate567

of the counterfactual: what would have happened without ad exposures.568

But this ideal approach can be quite expensive, so it is worth looking for569

alternative ways to predict the counterfactual. One way to do this is to use570

the Bayesian Structural Time Series method described earlier.571

Suppose a given company wants to determine the impact of an advertising572

campaign on its sales. It first uses BSTS (or some other technique) to build573

a model predicting the time series of sales as a function its past history,574

seasonal effects and other possible predictors such as Google queries on its575

company name, its competitors names, or products that it produces. Since576

there are many possible choices for predictors, it is important to use some577

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variable selection mechanism such as those described earlier.578

It next runs an ad campaign for a few weeks and records sales during579

this period. Finally, it makes a forecast of what sales would have been in580

the absence of the ad campaign using the model developed in the first stage.581

Comparing the actual outcome to the counterfactual outcome gives us an582

estimate of causal effect of advertising.583

Figure 9, taken from Brodersen et al. [2013], shows the outcome of this584

procedure. Panel a shows the actual sales and the prediction of what the585

sales would have been without the campaign based on the BSTS forecasting586

model. Panel bshows the difference between actual and predicted sales, and587

Panelc shows the cumulative difference. It is clear from this figure that there588

was a significant causal impact of advertising which can then be compared589

to the cost of the advertising to evaluate the campaign.590

Note that this procedure does not require a control group in the conven-591

tional sense. I fact a good predictive model can be better than a random592

control group, which is usually thought to be the gold standard. To see this,593

suppose that you run an ad campaign in 100 cities and retain 100 cities as594

a control. After the experience is over, you discover the weather was dra-595

matically different over the cities in the study. Should you use weather as a596

predictor of the counterfactual? Of course! If weather affects sales (which it597

does) then you will get a more accurate prediction of the counterfactual and598

thus a better estimate of the causal effect of advertising.599

9 Model uncertainty600

An important insight from machine learning is that averaging over many601

small models tends to give better out-of-sample prediction than choosing a602

single model.603

In 2006, Netflix offered a million dollar prize to researchers who could604

provide the largest improvement to their existing movie recommendation605

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Figure 9: Actual and predicted sales.

system. The winning submission involved a complex blending of no fewer606

than 800 models though they also point out that predictions of good quality607

can usually be obtained by combining a small number of judiciously chosen608

methods. (Feuerverger et al. [2012].) It also turned out that a blend of the609

best and second-best model outperformed both of them.610

Ironically, it was recognized many years ago that averages of macroeco-611

nomic model forecasts outperformed individual models, but somehow this612

idea was rarely exploited in traditional econometrics. The exception is the613

literature on Bayesian model averaging which has seen a steady flow of work;614

see Steel [2011] for a survey.615

However, I think that model uncertainty has crept in to applied econo-616

metrics through the back door. Many papers in applied econometrics present617

regression results in a table with several different specifications: which vari-618

ables are included in the controls, which variables are used as instruments,619

and so on. The goal is usually to show that the estimate of some interesting620

parameter is not very sensitive to the exact specification used.621

One way to think about it is that these tables illustrate a simple form of622

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model uncertainty: how an estimated parameter varies as different models are623

used. In these papers the authors tend to examine only a few representative624

specifications, but there is no reason why they couldnt examine many more625

if the data were available.626

In this period of big data it seems strange to focus on sampling un-627

certainty, which tends to be small with large data sets, while completely628

ignoring model uncertaintywhich may be quite large. One way to address629

this is to be explicit about examining how parameter estimates vary with630

respect to choices of control variables and instruments.631

10 Summary and further reading632

Since computers are now involved in many economic transactions, big data633

will only get bigger. Data manipulation tools and techniques developed for634

small datasets will become increasingly inadequate to deal with new prob-635

lems. Researchers in machine learning have developed ways to deal with636

large data sets and economists interested in dealing with such data would be637

well advised to invest in learning these techniques.638

I have already mentioned Hastie et al. [2009] which has detailed descrip-639

tions of all the methods discussed here but at a relatively advanced level.640

James et al. [2013] describes many of the same topics at an undergraduate-641

level, along with R code and many examples.5642

Venables and Ripley [2002] contains good discussions of these topics with643

emphasis on applied examples. Leek [2013] presents a number of YouTube644

videos with gentle and accessible introductions to several tools of data anal-645

ysis. Howe [2013] provides a somewhat more advanced introduction to data646

science that also includes discussions of SQL and NoSQL databases. Wu647

and Kumar [2009] gives detailed descriptions and examples of the major al-648

5There are several economic examples in the book where the tension between predictive

modeling and causal modeling is apparent.

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gorithms in data mining, while Williams [2011] provides a unified toolkit.649

Domingos [2012] summarizes some important lessons which include pitfalls650

to avoid, important issues to focus on and answers to common questions.651

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