When you start discussing with people in machine learning, you quickly hear something like “forget your econometric models, your GLMs, I can easily find a machine learning ‘model’ that can beat yours”. I am usually very sceptical, especially when I hear “easily” or “always“. I have no problem about the fact that I use old econometric models, but I had the feeling that things aren’t that easy. I can understand that we might have problems when we do have a lot of features (I am still working on that, I’ll get back to this point soon), but I have the feeling that I can still capture interactions, and non-linearities with standard econometric models as well as any machine learning algorithm.
Just to illustrate, consider the following ‘model‘
where is (just to illustrate)
> n <- 5000 > rtf <- function(x1, x2) { sin(x1+x2)/(x1+x2) } > xgrid <- seq(1,6,length=31) > ygrid <- seq(1,6,length=31) > zgrid <- outer(xgrid,ygrid,rtf) > persp(xgrid,ygrid,zgrid,theta=30, phi=30, + col="green", ticktype="detailed",shade=TRUE)
