Principles of Programming in Econometrics
Principles of Programming in Econometrics is a bootcamp course intended for beginning QRM and TI/BDS PhD students, aspiring to flavour their research with their own coding. The course is build around material collected over the years, around either the Ox, Matlab, and nowadays Python languages.
Topics
Topics covered within the course are- Structure of coding (where do I start)
- Structure of a program (how do I build in robustness)
- Concepts of variables/functions (what do I program)
- What is a number, should I care for rounding errors (what could go wrong)
- Optimisation and solving (non-)linear equations (how do I find the answer)
- and further matters...
Setup 2022
In 2022, the course will be limited to four afternoons, from Tuesday August 23-Friday August 26 (13-16.30/17.00h) at the Moscow room at the Tinbergen Institute Amsterdam. The room does not contain desktops, hence bring your own laptop.
These afternoons, both the teacher and several teaching assistants will help you move through the material. However, the material needs time for practice, hence you will not escape starting on time, several weeks earlier, such that you can use the supervision more intensely.
The table below lists the topics, explanatory video's, and practice material. Try to work through the material as far as you can, e.g. at least until the optimisation topics.
At this Google Doc, please annotate the exercises you have performed, leaving a mark as to whether you found them easy (=1), or hard (=5), or got stuck (=x).
Download material
Questions & answers
At Q&A I'll post a page with questions and answers, as they come up. Later, the questions and answers will move to Canvas.
Updates
2022/7/30: Opened up the videos further; should now be visible without a VUNet login
2022/8/15: Added answers to E0 exercise
2022/8/16: Added location: Tinbergen Institute Amsterdam. Please bring your own laptop!
2022/8/24: Added exercises (at bottom of current page)
Topic | Pages | Video | Exercise |
---|---|---|---|
Day 0: Introduction | 1-1 | Vid | |
Exercise E0 | (read/answer these questions now, answers here) | code | |
Installation | 55-59 | Vid | |
Getting started | - | Vid | |
Target | 1-5 | Vid (18:19) | |
Example 2^8, syntax | 12-23 | Vid 1 (33:50), Vid 2 (16:22) | pynb d0p1 |
(Hungarian) Notation, variable names | 24-32 | Vid (23:08) | pynb d0p3_secret |
Recap, review syntax | 33-54 | Vid (47:52) | pynb d0p2_backsubstitution |
Day 1: Intro | 60-61 | Vid (9:59) | |
Theory: Planning programs | 62-74 | Vid (32:03) | pynb d1p2_fill |
Concepts: Data, variables, functions, actions | 75-91 | Vid (39:47) | pynb d1p1_olsgen |
View versus copy, scope | 92-101 | Vid (33:43) | |
Day 2: Preview | 102-103 | To add? | |
Steps | 104-110 | Vid (12:06) | |
Flow: Coherent structure for the program | 111-114 | Vid (13:59) | |
Precision: Floating point numbers and rounding errors | 115-123 | Vid (25:13) | |
Do's and dont's: Practical advice | 124-125 | Vid (13:12) | pynb d2p2_olsgen2 |
Import: Importing packages and routines | 126-128 | Vid (12:05) | |
Graphs: Plotting in python | 129-136 | Vid (14:19) | pynb d2p4_graphs |
Pandas: Data analytics/handling | 137-151 | Vid (41:57) | pynb d2p3_pandas |
Day 3: Newton-Raphson Optimisation | 152-166 | Vid (32:20) | |
Minimize: Likelihood, precision, convergence and scores | 167-190 | Vid 1 (30:39), Vid 2 (20:12) | pynb d3p1_ll, d3p2_grad |
Solving: Solving non-linear equations | 191-198 | Vid (15:06) | |
StDev: standard deviation | 199-205 | Vid (17:34) | pynb d3p3_sd |
Restrictions: SLSQP vs BFGS | 206-222 | Vid (27:17) | |
Extra: Speed | 223-234 | Vid (29:46) | |
Closing thoughts | See class, with estbern.py |
Final exercises
The groups of TI and BDS are obliged to hand in a final exercise before Friday September 30, 23:59h, through Canvas (link to be provided). This exercise can be chosen from the set- GARCH-X: Estimate inflation data, with initially OLS, then including GARCH
- Binary Tree: Calculate the price of an option through a binary tree