paper Archives - Kind-of-Lost

Easterlin Paradox and Early Retirement

Throughout this post, I discuss the relationship between two concepts from the field of Economics(?): the Easterlin paradox and early retirement.

Early retirement is a controversial issue in economics and personal finance. I have written about it in an earlier post. Many Americans consider early retirement more than just a chance to have the most relaxing time of their lives. They can either succeed or drown at a crucial point in their lives from this point.

Easterlin paradox, on the other hand (or coincidently?), explores the relationship between income and happiness, or lack thereof.

A neural network approach to college football rankings

The usual image of an artificial neural network:

What follows is a paper that I wrote in the Spring of 2001 for an “Introduction to Neural Networks” class that I took as part of my Master’s degree. It is mostly a review of someone else’s paper on the subject, except that I wrote the network in Excel and ran it on that year’s football season games. Fun, fun. Continue reading “A neural network approach to college football rankings”

McNemar’s test and Simpson’s Paradox (and the “hot hand” in basketball)

(I wrote this paper in 2007 for a Statistics class I took while trying to do a Ph.D. I am sharing it here for posterity.)

McNemar’s test is a non-parametric method used on nominal data to determine whether the row and column marginal frequencies are equal. It is applied to 2×2 contingency tables with a dichotomous trait with matched pairs of subjects.

Simpson’s paradox is a statistical paradox in which the successes of several groups seem to be reversed when the groups are combined. This seemingly impossible result is encountered often in social science statistics and occurs when a weighting variable, which is not relevant to the individual group assessment, must be used in the combined assessment.

The paper evaluates the potential effect of Simpson’s paradox in McNemar’s test results and conclusions.

Continue reading “McNemar’s test and Simpson’s Paradox (and the “hot hand” in basketball)”