Applications of Data Mining in economics

Question

I am looking for a thesis topic for my Applied Economics degree where I can use Data Mining/Machine Learning for some kind of prediction.

Do you guys have any good ideas about what I could do?

My first thought was credit scoring, but that seems a little boring considering the number of papers out there and the lack of available data.

I don't want to write about stock market forecasting because that's what I did for my mathematician thesis.

A good topic would be predicting some sort of an economical indicator but I don't really have any good ideas so far.

Thank you!

Have you tried asking a professor in your department for ideas? — , Sep 23 '13 at 16:47
The economics department is not very big on data mining, I asked them but they couldnt give me any good ideas — Gyula, Sep 23 '13 at 18:02
This question appears to be off-topic because it is about getting a thesis topic rather than a statistical question itself — Andy, Jun 03 '14 at 16:05

dimitriy · Answer 1 · 2014-06-03T15:44:53.440

5

Here's a nice survey by Einav and Levin of what's been done and some directions for further research (Section 5). Here is an application to Netflix data and price discrimination where ML techniques do the heavy lifting in feature selection and demand estimation. Here's a paper on Yelp review fraud, where Yelp's fraud detection algorithm provided identification. This is a more gingerly use of these methods.

Here's another nice survey by Hal Varian (chief economist at Google).

edited Jun 03 '14 at 15:44

answered Sep 23 '13 at 17:25

dimitriy

31,081
5
63
138

How are you doing ?Send me an email to catch up. – IrishStat Sep 23 '13 at 17:30
the first link of the "nice survey" doesn't work. – Jack Twain Jun 02 '14 at 12:38
@AlexTwain Link is fixed. – dimitriy Jun 03 '14 at 15:45
I'm curious, is @IrishStat stalking you or something? Who is he?! :p – Jack Twain Jun 04 '14 at 09:17
Dimitriy and I worked together on his Domino's data when he was at Domino's. They were interested in using AUTOBOX to predict activity at 15 minute intervals. Give me a call if you wish to discuss this offline. – IrishStat Jun 04 '14 at 11:23

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 23 '13 at 17:24

There's a recent article that uses Google Trends to predict financial crises or other economic events: http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130425/srep01684/full/srep01684.html

A similar approach can use Twitter (as in here), to predict other economic events or variables (e.g. marginal utilities, prices, etc).

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 21 '13 at 14:50

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) in the form of "regime switching models" have been used to determine growth/decline periods (I know, they're not technically HMMs, but they basically are). Does that count? Read up on the work of James Hamilton if you're interested: http://weber.ucsd.edu/~jhamilto/

Applications of Data Mining in economics

3 Answers3