6.4 Terminological differences (2)

  • Well-established labels in the older literatures vs. new ML terminology
    • Sample used to estimate the parameters vs. training sample
    • Model is estimated vs. Model is trained
    • Regressors, covariates, predictors vs. features (or inputs)
    • Dependent variable/outcome vs. output
    • Regression parameters (coefficients) vs. weights
  • Supervised vs. unsupervised machine learning (James et al. 2013, 1; Athey and Imbens 2019, 689)
    • Good analogy: Child in Kindergarden sorts toys (with or without teacher’s input )
    • Supervised statistical learning: involves building a statistical model for predicting, or estimating, an output based on one or more inputs
      • We observe both features \(x_{i}\) and the outcome \(y_{i}\)
    • Unsupervised statistical learning: There are inputs but no supervising output; we can still learn about relationships and structure from such data
      • Only observe \(X_{i}\) and try to group them into clusters

References

Athey, Susan, and Guido W Imbens. 2019. “Machine Learning Methods That Economists Should Know About.” Annu. Rev. Econom. 11 (1): 685–725.

James, Gareth, Daniela Witten, Trevor Hastie, and Robert Tibshirani. 2013. An Introduction to Statistical Learning: With Applications in R. Springer Texts in Statistics. Springer.