Economics Research Seminar Series

Respected faculty members and students,

Department of Economics, IBA cordially invites you to a two-day workshop "Introduction to Machine Learning for Economists" on Monday, December 7th, 2020 and Tuesday, December 8th, 2020. The resource person is Sonan Ahmed Memon, who is a faculty member at IBA and has studied machine learning during his stay at Oxford University, UK for his MPhil degree in Economics. This is part 1 of the online workshop series which focuses on the basics of machine learning and its application to economics. Part 2 of this workshop series will be held in January 2021. The target group is graduate (MS/MPhil and PhD) students in economics, however, faculty members and researchers who are interested in machine learning in economics may attend the workshop.

The program and schedule of the workshop is as follows.

Lecture 1

Date & Time: Monday, December 7th, 2020 at 02:00 P.M. to 04.00 P.M.
Content: Introduction to Machine Learning (ML), Relation between ML and Econometrics, Basic Statistical Decision Theory, Cross-Validation, Variance, Bias Trade off, Regularization/Shrinkage Estimators such as Ridge Regression, and LASSO (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator), Economic Application of LASSO.

Lecture 2

Date & Time: Tuesday, December 8th, 2020 at 02:00 P.M. to 04.00 P.M.
Content: Multi-Armed Bandit Problem, Active Learning: Exploration/Exploitation Trade off, Thompson Sampling Algorithm, Contextual Bandits, Application of Bandit Problem in Job Assignment of Syrian Refugees in Jordanian Labor market based on Cario, Gordon, Kasy et al (2020).

Resources for course will be added on this link: https://github.com/sonanmemon/Introduction-to-ML-For-Economists

Zoom details:

Zoom Meeting Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83951552291?pwd=VHNXR0VHTDhUQ1gvOXBFWEN3emE3QT09
Meeting ID: 839 5155 2291
Passcode: 6miczd

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