I’ve been using snopes.com to fact check dubious stories since before fake news was a term. I still recommend it to everyone. I also teach elements of critical thinking in some of the actuarial normative skills workshops I run. By the time students get to me there, they are often already pessimistic and cynical when …
Category archives: predictive modelling
CT Water: News come 4 October?
Not much of value in this shoddily wording reporting on CT’s water shortage, except that we will hear an official update on the water disaster plan on 4 October. This is a topic of direct personal and business relevance, but also of a technical forecasting and measurement perspective. Very little I’ve seen so far gives …
31, 151 and what comes next
This is my first new post in over two years. There are many reasons for that, and I may get into that in a future post. As to why I’m restarting – a conversation with an old friend last night combined with a lunch discussion with an actuarial student a couple of weeks ago has …
Binary vs “vanilla” bets and hedging
Nassim Taleb, an author who usually inspires (except in his second book, Black Swans) has co-authored a paper with a long-tailed title “On the Difference between Binary Prediction and True Exposure with Implications for Forecasting Tournaments and Decision Making Research”. The paper isn’t paygated so check it out – it’s only 6 pages so definitely …
How not to calibrate a model
Any model is a simplification of reality. If it isn’t, then it isn’t a model as rather is the reality. A MODEL ISN’T REALITY Any simplified model I can imagine will also therefore not match reality exactly. The closer the model gets to the real world in more scenarios, the better it is. Not all …
Book Review: This Time is Different
It’s chock-full of analysis, numbers, tables and charts showing how as much as things change, the scope for financial crises changes very little. The comparison of Developed and Emerging Markets is particularly interesting in that the differences, while they do exist, are far smaller than stereotypical views. Emerging Markets do tend to have more ongoing sovereign defaults, but the frequency of banking crises is little different. Weirdly, some aspects of Emerging Market crises (such as employment impacts) are less than average for the Developed World.
Prediction: models versus market
This is not the best way to start serious analysis of models versus markets in the prediction space, but given that I’m writing an exam tomorrow I thought I should put the links out there now. I’ll address this topic again in the future. Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) discussed an old paper of his …
How not to lose money in Make a Million
I have a clear strategy for how not to lose money playing the Make a Million competition. As I explain it, you may come up with some smart tactics to win the competition and enhance your returns, but you’re on you’re own there. So, how does one not lose money with the Make a Million …