3,718 research outputs found
The International Volatility of Growth
Growth in the world economy is not shared equally among all countries, with some growing faster, some slower and some not at all. The cross-country distribution of growth is a useful tool for analysing the inequality of growth. The appropriately-weighted first moment of this distribution is world growth, while the second measures cross-country volatility. This paper introduces a methodology to examine the cross-country distribution of growth, and the components of its volatility. Using data from the Penn World Table, we find countries within geographic regions are seeing a harmonisation of growth, but between regions there is increasing dispersion.Growth, Cross-Country Distribution, Volatility
Probabilistic Perspectives on Collecting Human Uncertainty in Predictive Data Mining
In many areas of data mining, data is collected from humans beings. In this
contribution, we ask the question of how people actually respond to ordinal
scales. The main problem observed is that users tend to be volatile in their
choices, i.e. complex cognitions do not always lead to the same decisions, but
to distributions of possible decision outputs. This human uncertainty may
sometimes have quite an impact on common data mining approaches and thus, the
question of effective modelling this so called human uncertainty emerges
naturally.
Our contribution introduces two different approaches for modelling the human
uncertainty of user responses. In doing so, we develop techniques in order to
measure this uncertainty at the level of user inputs as well as the level of
user cognition. With support of comprehensive user experiments and large-scale
simulations, we systematically compare both methodologies along with their
implications for personalisation approaches. Our findings demonstrate that
significant amounts of users do submit something completely different (action)
than they really have in mind (cognition). Moreover, we demonstrate that
statistically sound evidence with respect to algorithm assessment becomes quite
hard to realise, especially when explicit rankings shall be built
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