Econometrics is an application of statistical methods to economic data in order to give empirical content to economic relationships. More precisely, it is "the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference." An introductory economics textbook describes econometrics as allowing economists "to sift through mountains of data to extract simple relationships." Jan Tinbergen is one of the two founding fathers of econometrics. The other, Ragnar Frisch, also coined the term in the sense in which it is used today.
SPSS Statistics is a statistical software suite developed by IBM for data management, advanced analytics, multivariate analysis, business intelligence, and criminal investigation. Long produced by SPSS Inc., it was acquired by IBM in 2009. Versions of the software released since 2015 have the brand name IBM SPSS Statistics.
Conjoint analysis is a survey-based statistical technique used in market research that helps determine how people value different attributes that make up an individual product or service.
Comma-separated values (CSV) is a text file format that uses commas to separate values, and newlines to separate records. A CSV file stores tabular data in plain text, where each line of the file typically represents one data record. Each record consists of the same number of fields, and these are separated by commas in the CSV file. If the field delimiter itself may appear within a field, fields can be surrounded with quotation marks.
gretl is an open-source statistical package, mainly for econometrics. The name is an acronym for GnuRegression, Econometrics and Time-seriesLibrary.
Stata is a general-purpose statistical software package developed by StataCorp for data manipulation, visualization, statistics, and automated reporting. It is used by researchers in many fields, including biomedicine, economics, epidemiology, and sociology.
In statistics, kernel density estimation (KDE) is the application of kernel smoothing for probability density estimation, i.e., a non-parametric method to estimate the probability density function of a random variable based on kernels as weights. KDE answers a fundamental data smoothing problem where inferences about the population are made based on a finite data sample. In some fields such as signal processing and econometrics it is also termed the Parzen–Rosenblatt window method, after Emanuel Parzen and Murray Rosenblatt, who are usually credited with independently creating it in its current form. One of the famous applications of kernel density estimation is in estimating the class-conditional marginal densities of data when using a naive Bayes classifier, which can improve its prediction accuracy.
RATS, an abbreviation of Regression Analysis of Time Series, is a statistical package for time series analysis and econometrics. RATS is developed and sold by Estima, Inc., located in Evanston, IL.
In statistics, shrinkage is the reduction in the effects of sampling variation. In regression analysis, a fitted relationship appears to perform less well on a new data set than on the data set used for fitting. In particular the value of the coefficient of determination 'shrinks'. This idea is complementary to overfitting and, separately, to the standard adjustment made in the coefficient of determination to compensate for the subjunctive effects of further sampling, like controlling for the potential of new explanatory terms improving the model by chance: that is, the adjustment formula itself provides "shrinkage." But the adjustment formula yields an artificial shrinkage.
FlexPro is a proprietary software package for analysis and presentation of scientific and technical data, produced by Weisang GmbH. It runs on Microsoft Windows and is available in English, German, Japanese, Chinese and French. FlexPro has its roots in the test and measurement domain and supports different binary file formats of data acquisition instruments and software. In particular, FlexPro can analyze large amounts of data with high sampling rates.
The topic of heteroskedasticity-consistent (HC) standard errors arises in statistics and econometrics in the context of linear regression and time series analysis. These are also known as heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors, Eicker–Huber–White standard errors, to recognize the contributions of Friedhelm Eicker, Peter J. Huber, and Halbert White.
The Heckman correction is a statistical technique to correct bias from non-randomly selected samples or otherwise incidentally truncated dependent variables, a pervasive issue in quantitative social sciences when using observational data. Conceptually, this is achieved by explicitly modelling the individual sampling probability of each observation together with the conditional expectation of the dependent variable. The resulting likelihood function is mathematically similar to the tobit model for censored dependent variables, a connection first drawn by James Heckman in 1974. Heckman also developed a two-step control function approach to estimate this model, which avoids the computational burden of having to estimate both equations jointly, albeit at the cost of inefficiency. Heckman received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000 for his work in this field.
Psychometric software refers to specialized programs used for the psychometric analysis of data obtained from tests, questionnaires, polls or inventories that measure latent psychoeducational variables. Although some psychometric analyses can be performed using general statistical software such as SPSS, most require specialized tools designed specifically for psychometric purposes.
A Newey–West estimator is used in statistics and econometrics to provide an estimate of the covariance matrix of the parameters of a regression-type model where the standard assumptions of regression analysis do not apply. It was devised by Whitney K. Newey and Kenneth D. West in 1987, although there are a number of later variants. The estimator is used to try to overcome autocorrelation, and heteroskedasticity in the error terms in the models, often for regressions applied to time series data. The abbreviation "HAC," sometimes used for the estimator, stands for "heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent." There are a number of HAC estimators described in, and HAC estimator does not refer uniquely to Newey–West. One version of Newey–West Bartlett requires the user to specify the bandwidth and usage of the Bartlett kernel from Kernel density estimation
Shazam is a comprehensive econometrics and statistics package for estimating, testing, simulating and forecasting many types of econometrics and statistical models. SHAZAM was originally created in 1977 by Kenneth White.
NLOGIT is an extension of the econometric and statistical software package LIMDEP. In addition to the estimation tools in LIMDEP, NLOGIT provides programs for estimation, model simulation and analysis of multinomial choice data, such as brand choice, transportation mode and for survey and market data in which consumers choose among a set of competing alternatives.
Control functions are statistical methods to correct for endogeneity problems by modelling the endogeneity in the error term. The approach thereby differs in important ways from other models that try to account for the same econometric problem. Instrumental variables, for example, attempt to model the endogenous variable X as an often invertible model with respect to a relevant and exogenous instrument Z. Panel analysis uses special data properties to difference out unobserved heterogeneity that is assumed to be fixed over time.
In statistics, a sequence of random variables is homoscedastic if all its random variables have the same finite variance; this is also known as homogeneity of variance. The complementary notion is called heteroscedasticity, also known as heterogeneity of variance. The spellings homoskedasticity and heteroskedasticity are also frequently used. “Skedasticity” comes from the Ancient Greek word “skedánnymi”, meaning “to scatter”. Assuming a variable is homoscedastic when in reality it is heteroscedastic results in unbiased but inefficient point estimates and in biased estimates of standard errors, and may result in overestimating the goodness of fit as measured by the Pearson coefficient.
