IN THIS POST WE SHALL EXPLORE VALUE-SUPRESSING UNCERTAINTY PALETTES.
One of my favorite new sites is xenographics that gives examples of and links to “weird, but (sometimes) useful charts”. The examples xenographics gives are undoubtedly interesting and might help inspire you if you’re looking for something new.
One new (to me) graphic was something called Value-Suppressing Uncertainty Palettes (VSUP). See this research paper (pdf). VSUPs “allocate larger ranges of a visual channel when uncertainty is low, and smaller ranges when uncertainty is high”.
IN THIS POST I WANT TO SHARE A GRAPH looking at the length of economic expansions and recessions in the United State over time. Earlier today, Andrew Chamberlain (on Twitter), observed that at the end of this month the current economic expansion in the U.S. would be the second longest in history. Let’s explore.
In the United States, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) dates expansions and recessions. See for example http://www.
LAST WEEK I POSTED A THREAD ON TWITTER COVERING RECENT HOUSING MARKET TRENDS AND THE OUTLOOK FOR MORTGAGE RATES:
#Mortgage rates are now at their highest level since January 2014. Will these higher borrowing costs dampen the spring homebuying season?
Some thoughts (+ charts)... pic.twitter.com/BegOb7p6iq
— 📈 Len Kiefer 📊 (@lenkiefer) April 19, 2018 Let’s unpack that thread and add a few more charts I’ve tweeted out in the past week.
TIME FOR A FUN NEW MORTGAGE RATE CHART.
This one:
We’ll use R to plot a new visualization of mortgage rates.
Let’s make it.
Data
As we did with our majestic mortgage rate plot post we’ll plot mortgage rates using the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey.
We’ll get the mortgage rates data via the Saint Louis Federal Reserve’s FRED database. If you followed my post from back in April of last year you know what we can do if we combine FRED with the quantmod package.
I LIKE TO MAKE ANIMATIONS WITH R. Sometimes folks ask me how they add to understanding. They don’t always, but often, particularly when you are working with time series, I find they help visualize trends and understand the evolution of variables.
I’ve written several posts on animation, see particularly this recent post on making a simple line plot and this post about improving animations with tweenr.
Tweenr is a handy package that lets you interpolate data and make smooth animations.
LET’S PICK BACK UP where we left off and think about communicating forecast results. To help guide our thinking, let’s set up a little game.
Basic setup
Like last time we’re going to focus on a situation where a forecaster observes some information about the world and makes an announcement about a future binary outcome. A decision maker observes the forecaster’s announcement and takes a binary action. Then the outcome is realized and the forecaster receives a payoff.
LAST FRIDAY WAS JOBS FRIDAY, the day when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases its monthly employment situation report. This report is blanketed with media coverage and economist and financial analysts all over the world pay close attention to the report. The employment situation gives a read on trends in the world’s largest economy’s labor market. It also provides a clue about how monetary policy might unfold, affecting bond yields around the world.
LAST WEEK IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL an article LINK talked about how pundits can strategically make probabilistic forecasts. It seems 40% is a sort of magic number, where it’s high enough that if the event comes true you can claim credit as a forecaster, but if it doesn’t happen, you still gave it less than 50/50 odds.
Since I’m often asked to make forecasts I’m interested in this problem.
Spring is nearly upon us, or at least we can hope. Let’s examine how housing activity typically rounds into shape as the weather warms up. We’ll make some fun plots with R.
Seasonality in housing data
Housing market activity in the United States is highly seasonal. Consider this animated plot.
This plot shows U.S. new home sales. Often the data are presented seasonally adjusted, but this plot is for non seasonally adjusted data.
LET US TAKE A LOOK AT HOUSE PRICE AND EMPLOYMENT TRENDS.
House prices in the Unitest States have been increasing at a rapid pace, about 7 percent on an annual basis. How does that relate to employment growth? And how do those trends vary by geography. Let’s take a look.
Per usual, I will post R code and you can follow along.
Data
Following recent posts (see here and here for example), we will use the Freddie Mac House Price Index an Excel spreadsheet can be downloaded here.