A cool little thing I did

Ok, so this a very brief post about how the sausage gets made, but I need it to test what I am doing, and some of you nerds might actually want to do this too.

So its not really worth getting into all the details here, but I have been trying to figure out for a while how I can get interactive visualizations onto this blog. After all, if it's a data science blog, we need to be able to see the data in a fun informative way. Oh, the other caveat is, I am totally cheap and didn't want to pay for my blog to be hosted.

Machine Inference

Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google, put together an awesome presentation about the differences and similarities between machine learning and econometrics. Varian clearly knows his stuff. Working at Google, he is privy to some of the foremost experts on machine-learning. And he no slouch when it comes to economics; he is the author of many students' favorite microeconomics textbook.

After getting a Ph.D in policy analysis where I studied a fair amount of econometrics, I started working as a data scientist using machine learning. Though I am not the same level expert that Varian is on the issue, I too have found myself talking about this a fair amount. So, at the risk of repeating much of the same subject matter, I decided I would write my take on it. My thoughts are a little less technical than Varian's, and are largely aligned with his presentation. By working through a real-ish example, I hope I can describe the risks of thinking addressing a topic that really requires econometrics with machine learning.