Problem with xtabond regression for panel data in stata - stata

I have a problem with the xtabond command. I would like to apply a GMM regression to my panel data. The state variables (two) should be lagged one period and the other variables (5) should be lagged two periods (the statistical approach is similar to Bailliu J. (2000) "Private Capital Flows, Financial Development, and Economic Growth in Developing Countries" and Caselli et al. (1996) "Reopening the Convergence Debate: A New Look at Cross-Country Growth Empirics.” ). I read the PDF file for xtabond, but unfortunately, I couldn't figure out the best way to set up the code. I tried the following:
Code:
import excel , sheet("Komplett ohne Fomel") firstrow clear
gen logGDP = log(GDP)
gen logInIncome = log(InitialIncome)
*Generating panel-dataset
xtset CountryNumber Year
*GMM Regression
xtabond logGDP l(0/1).(logInIncome InitialSchooling) l(0/2).(ckaopen Governmentconsumption Inflation LawandOrder CorruptioninGovernment) , lags(2) level(90) vce(robust)
Does anyone have a suggestion on how I can best solve this so that I proceed similarly to, for example, Bailliu (2000) and Caselli et al. (1996)?
P.S I use the Stata/BE 17.0 for Windows (64-bit x86-64) version.

Related

Choose the appropriate way to deal with weights in svyset in Stata

I decided to post here a kind information for support I put in Statalist yesterday. I have not yet received a possible hint and thought it could be useful to extend the audience by posting it here.
The link to the original post is the following:
https://www.statalist.org/forums/forum/general-stata-discussion/general/1659627-choose-the-appropriate-way-to-deal-with-weights-in-svyset?view=thread
Dear Members,
I defined a questionnaire to gather respondents' willingness to get vaccinated against COVID-19 via a discrete choice experiment. I relied on a company specialized in political opinion polls and market research to administer the survey. The company computed a weight for each respondent based on 1) the geographical location where the respondent lives (five macroareas of Italy), 2) whether the respondent has a bachelor degree or not, and 3) to which age group she/he pertains (five classes are considered).
The sum of the weights is equal to the number of individuals in the database. The individuals pertaining to the age classes 30-39 and 40-49 are oversampled, as per our request (related to a research hypothesis). The proportion of such two classes within the sample is larger than the actual in the Italian population. Weights are computed in order to take into account for this feature and guarantee that the sample is representative of the characteristics of the Italian population.
I will use the data to estimate a logit model, multinomial logit models and mixed logit models.
The issue I am facing with is the proper path to follow to declare the nature of the weight. I have no experience in the use of Stata to deal with this issue.
I am using Stata 17 on a PC with Windows 10 Pro 64 bit.
Combining the information from the video, the svysvyset manual and the results from the help for "weight" I tried to think what is the most appropriate solution.
I tried to add here the code multiple times as well but I kept receiving an error message on how I formatted it. My apologies

Using Logistic Regression For Timeseries Data in Amazon SageMaker

For a project I am working on, which uses annual financial reports data (of multiple categories) from companies which have been successful or gone bust/into liquidation, I previously created a (fairly well performing) model on AWS Sagemaker using a multiple linear regression algorithm (specifically, the AWS stock algorithm for logistic regression/classification problems - the 'Linear Learner' algorithm)
This model just produces a simple "company is in good health" or "company looks like it will go bust" binary prediction, based on one set of annual data fed in; e.g.
query input: {data:[{
"Gross Revenue": -4000,
"Balance Sheet": 10000,
"Creditors": 4000,
"Debts": 1000000
}]}
inference output: "in good health" / "in bad health"
I trained this model by just ignoring what year for each company the values were from and pilling in all of the annual financial reports data (i.e. one years financial data for one company = one input line) for the training, along with the label of "good" or "bad" - a good company was one which has existed for a while, but hasn't gone bust, a bad company is one which was found to have eventually gone bust; e.g.:
label
Gross Revenue
Balance Sheet
Creditors
Debts
good
10000
20000
0
0
bad
0
5
100
10000
bad
20000
0
4
100000000
I hence used these multiple features (gross revenue, balance sheet...) along with the label (good/bad) in my training input, to create my first model.
I would like to use the same features as before as input (gross revenue, balance sheet..) but over multiple years; e.g take the values from 2020 & 2019 and use these (along with the eventual company status of "good" or "bad") as the singular input for my new model. However I'm unsure of the following:
is this an inappropriate use of logistic regression Machine learning? i.e. is there a more suitable algorithm I should consider?
is it fine, or terribly wrong to try and just use the same technique as before, but combine the data for both years into one input line like:
label
Gross Revenue(2019)
Balance Sheet(2019)
Creditors(2019)
Debts(2019)
Gross Revenue(2020)
Balance Sheet(2020)
Creditors(2020)
Debts(2020)
good
10000
20000
0
0
30000
10000
40
500
bad
100
50
200
50000
100
5
100
10000
bad
5000
0
2000
800000
2000
0
4
100000000
I would personally expect that a company which has gotten worse over time (i.e. companies finances are worse in 2020 than in 2019) should be more likely to be found to be a "bad"/likely to go bust, so I would hope that, if I feed in data like in the above example (i.e. earlier years data comes before later years data, on an input line) my training job ends up creating a model which gives greater weighting to the earlier years data, when making predictions
Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated - I'm pretty new to machine learning and would like to learn more
UPDATE:
Using Long-Short-Term-Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM RNN) is one potential route I think I could try taking, but this seems to commonly just be used with multivariate data over many dates; my data only has 2 or 3 dates worth of multivariate data, per company. I would want to try using the data I have for all the companies, over the few dates worth of data there are, in training
I once developed a so called Genetic Time Series in R. I used a Genetic Algorithm which sorted out the best solutions from multivariate data, which were fitted on a VAR in differences or a VECM. Your data seems more macro economic or financial than user-centric and VAR or VECM seems appropriate. (Surely it is possible to treat time-series data in the same way so that we can use LSTM or other approaches, but these are very common) However, I do not know if VAR in differences or VECM works with binary classified labels. Perhaps if you would calculate a metric outcome, which you later label encode to a categorical feature (or label it first to a categorical) than VAR or VECM may also be appropriate.
However you may add all yearly data points to one data points per firm to forecast its survival, but you would loose a lot of insight. If you are interested in time series ML which works a little bit different than for neural networks or elastic net (which could also be used with time series) let me know. And we can work something out. Or I'll paste you some sources.
Summary:
1.)
It is possible to use LSTM, elastic NEt (time points may be dummies or treated as cross sectional panel) or you use VAR in differences and VECM with a slightly different out come variable
2.)
It is possible but you will loose information over time.
All the best,
Patrick

Train program to understand high and low value in machine learning

I am generating alerts by reading dataset for KPI (key performance indicator) . My algorithm is looking into historical data and based on that I am able to capture if there's sudden spike in data. But I am generating false alarms . For example KPI1 is historically at .5 but reaches value 12, which is kind of spike .
Same way KPI2 also reaches from .5 to 12. But I know that KPI reaching from .5 to 12 is not a big deal and I need not to capture that . same way KPI2 reaching from .5 to 12 is big deal and I need to capture that.
I want to train my program to understand what is high value , low value or normal value for each KPI.
Could you experts tell me which is best ML algorithm is for this and any package in python I need to explore?
This is the classification problem. You can use classic logistic regression algorithm to classify any given sample into either high value, low value or normal value.
Quoting from the Wikipedia,
In statistics, multinomial logistic regression is a classification
method that generalizes logistic regression to multiclass problems,
i.e. with more than two possible discrete outcomes. That is, it is
a model that is used to predict the probabilities of the different
possible outcomes of a categorically distributed dependent variable,
given a set of independent variables (which may be real-valued,
binary-valued, categorical-valued, etc.)
To perform multi-class classification in python, sklearn library can be useful.
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/multiclass.html

Finding a correlation between variable and class variable

I have a dataset which contains 7 numerical attributes and one nominal which is the class variable. I was wondering how I can the best attribute that can be used to predict the class attribute. Would finding the largest information gain by each attribute be the solution?
So the problem you are asking about falls under the domain of feature selection, and more broadly, feature engineering. There is a lot of literature online regarding this, and there are definitely a lot of blogs/tutorials/resources online for how to do this.
To give you a good link I just read through, here is a blog with a tutorial on some ways to do feature selection in Weka, and the same blog's general introduction on feature selection. Naturally there are a lot of different approaches, as knb's answer pointed out.
To give a short description though, there are a few ways to go about it: you can assign a score to each of your features (like information gain, etc) and filter out features with 'bad' scores; you can treat finding the best parameters as a search problem, where you take different subsets of the features and assess the accuracy in turn; and you can use embedded methods, which kind of learn which features contribute most to the accuracy as the model is being built. Examples of embedded methods are regularization algorithms like LASSO and ridge regression.
Do you just want that attribute's name, or do you also want a quantifiable metric (like a t-value) for this "best" attribute?
For a qualitative approach, you can generate a classification tree with just one split, two leaves.
For example, weka's "diabetes.arff" sample-dataset (n = 768), which has a similar structure as your dataset (all attribs numeric, but the class attribute has only two distinct categorical outcomes), I can set the minNumObj parameter to, say, 200. This means: create a tree with minimum 200 instances in each leaf.
java -cp $WEKA_JAR/weka.jar weka.classifiers.trees.J48 -C 0.25 -M 200 -t data/diabetes.arff
Output:
J48 pruned tree
------------------
plas <= 127: tested_negative (485.0/94.0)
plas > 127: tested_positive (283.0/109.0)
Number of Leaves : 2
Size of the tree : 3
Time taken to build model: 0.11 seconds
Time taken to test model on training data: 0.04 seconds
=== Error on training data ===
Correctly Classified Instances 565 73.5677 %
This creates a tree with one split on the "plas" attribute. For interpretation, this makes sense, because indeed, patients with diabetes have an elevated concentration of glucose in their blood plasma. So "plas" is the most important attribute, as it was chosen for the first split. But this does not tell you how important.
For a more quantitative approach, maybe you can use (Multinomial) Logistic Regression. I'm not so familiar with this, but anyway:
In the Exlorer GUI Tool, choose "Classify" > Functions > Logistic.
Run the model. The odds ratio and the coefficients might contain what you need in a quantifiable manner. Lower odds-ratio (but > 0.5) is better/more significant, but I'm not sure. Maybe read on here, this answer by someone else.
java -cp $WEKA_JAR/weka.jar weka.classifiers.functions.Logistic -R 1.0E-8 -M -1 -t data/diabetes.arff
Here's the command line output
Options: -R 1.0E-8 -M -1
Logistic Regression with ridge parameter of 1.0E-8
Coefficients...
Class
Variable tested_negative
============================
preg -0.1232
plas -0.0352
pres 0.0133
skin -0.0006
insu 0.0012
mass -0.0897
pedi -0.9452
age -0.0149
Intercept 8.4047
Odds Ratios...
Class
Variable tested_negative
============================
preg 0.8841
plas 0.9654
pres 1.0134
skin 0.9994
insu 1.0012
mass 0.9142
pedi 0.3886
age 0.9852
=== Error on training data ===
Correctly Classified Instances 601 78.2552 %
Incorrectly Classified Instances 167 21.7448 %

Block bootstrap with indicator variable for each block

I want to run block bootstrap, where the blocks are countries, and include country indicator variables. I thought the following would work.
regress mvalue kstock i.country, vce(bootstrap, cluster(country))
But I get the following error.
. regress mvalue kstock i.country, vce(bootstrap, cluster(country))
(running regress on estimation sample)
Bootstrap replications (50)
----+--- 1 ---+--- 2 ---+--- 3 ---+--- 4 ---+--- 5
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxxxx 50
insufficient observations to compute bootstrap standard errors
no results will be saved
r(2000);
It seems that this should work. If the block bootstrap picks the same country for every block, then it seems it should just drop the intercept.
Is my error coding or conceptual? Here is some code using the grunfeld data.
webuse grunfeld, clear
xtset, clear
generate country = int((company - 1) / 2) + 1
regress mvalue kstock i.country, vce(bootstrap, cluster(country))
The problem here is not with your coding, but is conceptual. The problem is that you cannot identify each coefficient in each regression in each bootstrap sample. Not all "countries" are included in the dataset for each bootstrap repetition. You can diagnose what is going on with the vce( , noisily) sub-option:
. regress mvalue kstock i.bscountry, vce(bootstrap, cluster(country) noisily)
Errors are generated because some coefficients are missing when the regression runs with particular bootstrap samples. In each regression you can see that some countries dummies are being omitted due to collinearity. This should be expected and makes a lot of sense -- the country dummies could =0 for all observations in the bootstrap sample if the country was not drawn!
If you are really trying to estimate the coefficients on the country dummies, you are going to have to find another approach than bootstrapping with K clusters if K is the number of countries. If you don't care about the coefficient dummies you could use another command that simply absorbs the fixed effects and only reports the coefficients on the other independent variables (e.g., areg or xtreg). One way think about what is going on is that it is analogous to this:
.bootstrap, cluster(country) idcluster(bscountry) noisily: regress mvalue kstock i.bscountry
With the idcluster() option, each country that is drawn in a bootstrap sample is given its own ID number. If a country is drawn twice then there are two dummies. (The coefficients for the two dummies naturally turn out to be identical or near-identical.) However, the coefficients in this output are are completely meaningless because bscountry "2" will be different countries in different bootstrap iterations. Since you would ignore any output on the dummies, you might as well use a model like areg or xtreg since they run more quickly.
Although there are many applications where bootstrapping with clusters would work fine, the problem here is the inclusion of cluster dummies in the regression. This all begs the question of whether this exercise makes any sense at all. If you are trying to estimate the coefficients for the country dummies, then certainly not. Otherwise, the solutions above might be OK, but it is hard to say without knowing your research question.