Publications by Sam Weiss
Modeling "This Time is Different"
Check out PDF for EquationsAnd Code to run yourselfIntroduction:“This Time is different” by Reinhart and Rogoff is an empirical history of financial crises and panics. It describes many economic events such as; inflation, bubbles, and defaults.The theme that ties these events together is the idea that people have an unrealistic expectation...
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Modeling "This Time is Different" in R
Check out PDF for EquationsAnd Code to run yourselfIntroduction:“This Time is different” by Reinhart and Rogoff is an empirical history of financial crises and panics. It describes many economic events such as; inflation, bubbles, and defaults.The theme that ties these events together is the idea that people have an unrealistic expecta...
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didYouMean() Function: Using Google to correct errors in Strings
A function that will take a String as an input and return the “Did you mean..” or “Showing Results for..” from google.com. Good for misspelled names or locations.Githublibrary(RCurl)didYouMean=function(input){ input=gsub(” “, “+”, input) doc=getURL(paste(“https://www.google.com/search?q=”,input,”/”, sep=””)) �...
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Mideast Graph 3: Slate Middle East Friendship
Slate recently published a great info-graphic about Middle-East Relationships. It shows the relationships (Friend, Enemy, or Complicated) of 13 countries / organizations and the relationships between each pair. One draw back of the chart is that it doesn’t show if countries / organizations cluster among each other. This post will attempt to rec...
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Predicting Monthly Car Sales for Brands in US: First Step
I’ve set out to produce monthly forecasts of monthly car sales by brand in the US. So far I’ve made a SUTSE dynamic linear model (code on Github) and created a Shiny app (http://sweiss.shinyapps.io/carvis/) as a prototype (no predictions yet).Basically, I want to combine my interest in cars with my interest in stats.My current roadblock is...
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Predicting Monthly Car Sales: The Residuals are the Story
I’ll produce predictions for US car sales by manufacture every month. There are already several blogs that describe the industry and sales that do a great job. Autoblog by the Numbers and Counting Cars are some to mention. Unlike their analysis, I’ll try to focus on the residuals (the stuff I can’t predict) to tell the story. To highli...
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Western Front Battle Exchange Rates
Introduction:GithubThe Western Front in World War One is considered a a war of outdated tactics combined with brutal efficiency of technology. And while the war saw the introduction of several innovations (eg. tanks and airplanes) the general routine of heavy artillery bombardments followed by men “going over the top” to meet barbed wire and ...
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WW1 Monthly Casualties by Fronts and Belligerents
GithubI’ve been reading a few books on WW1 and wanted to see a time series plot of battle casualty/pow by country to get a better understanding of how the conflict fits together. I couldn’t find any database for military casualties in WW1 but Wikipedia does include casualty statistics for each battle. I wrote some code to scrape / parse it bu...
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Slate Middle East Graph #2
I recently saw Slate.com redid its Mideast Graphic and thought it would be good to redo my previous analysis. From the original slate graphic it’s hard to make much sense of what’s happening and who’s friends with whom.From the graph below we can see 3 clearly (more or less) defined groups. Nusra and ISIS are Jihadists and have no friends....
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Beyond Beta: Relationships between partialPlot(), ICEbox(), and predcomps()
Machine Learning models generally outperform standard regression models in terms of predictive performance. However, these models tend to be poor in explaining how they achieve a particular result. This post will discuss three methods used to peak inside “black box” models and the connections between them.Ultimately the methods discussed here...
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