(tongue in cheek here)

At your next cocktail party you may find yourself amid a sophisticated discussion this week's Nobel Prize awards. Here are the terms you'll need, to talk about the recipients of the prize in Economics. From the award announcement:

"This year’s laureates have developed methods that capture two key properties of many economic time series: nonstationarity and time-varying volatility."

"Clive Granger demonstrated that the statistical methods used for stationary time series could yield wholly misleading results when applied to the analysis of nonstationary data. His significant discovery [of how to deal with this phenomenon is called] cointegration."

"Robert Engle’s discovery was ... that the concept of autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) accurately captures the properties of many time series ..."

Whew!

Is it actually heteroscedasticity? I found it in either the business or the medical books of Onelook, using the "c", not the "k". In medicine it seems to mean: "(het²[schwa]r-o-sk[schwa]-das-tis¢[ibreve]-te) [hetero- + Gr. skedastikos tending to scatter] the property of having unequal variances." I don't use the word on a daily basis, so I had to look it up.

However, the business definition was less useful: "Contingency analysis". That works well if you know what "contingency analysis" is!

Speaking of which, I abhor definitions that are either technical, like that, or that use the same words in the definition; for example, today we asked a funding agency for the job description of the "Project Director." They quite glibly replied, "they would direct the project." Duh!

quote:

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Originally posted by Kalleh:

Speaking of which, I abhor definitions that are either technical, like that, or that use the same words in the definition;Duh!

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recursive adj. see recursive

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me: "autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH)"
she: "Is it actually heteroscedasticity?"

What I'd put was a cut-and-paste from the Nobel Committee's announcement. But I checked the phrase in google, and it appears each way, the former way predominating by only about a 3:2 margin. Good catch, hon!