Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Thesis Meeting Overview: July 23rd 2007

On Monday the 23rd of July my thesis weekly resumed with Dr. Poon and his other supervised engineering thesis students. The purpose of this meeting was to provide each other a brief overview of what we have found in our research areas. My overview was based on informing Dr.Poon, Gary and Nik about the different means where elasticity of substitution can be measured. The details of my presentation can be found in my previous posts. This was a very interesting as I became more aware of Nik's and Gary's topics. Gary gave a very interesting presentation about Fuzzy clustering and different algorithms which implement fuzzy clustering such as c-means and clustering regression. Nik gave an overview about General Additive Models (GAM).

My thesis meeting also clarified the steps we will take in finding a suitable data set for my model since our plans to obtain a particular subset of the data collected from the ABS economic activity survey fell through. Simon has proposed that as a data gathering and skills building exercise, Nik, Gary and myself to construct a data from the publicly available data from the ABS. The data to be collected is from the following catalogs:
  • 5204.0 – Australian System of National Accounts
  • 5206.0 – Australian National Accounts
Our task is it replicate the data collection and construction technique from the following paper:
  • Parham, D., Roberts, P. & Sun, H.,'Information Technology and Australia's Productivity Surge', 2007.
The items that we will be extracting from catalogs 5204.0 and 5206.0 include items such as:
  • Industry Value Add (output)
  • Cost of Employment
  • Industry Machinery
It has been agreed that we will each overview these catalogs and gain familiarity with the data construction techniques, We will then get together to aggregate our data into a single data set and will also chase up the ABS about acquiring any missing data. Additionally I am also responsible for finding and appropriate deflator for our data set. Since we have observations across time it is important to account for inflation and express the units in constant dollar terms across the time range.

Once we have aggregated and formed our data set we will each use this data set in our respective projects where hopefully we can find interesting results which we can use to assist the other in their project.
Our next meeting is to be held Wednesday next week. I am also required to provide another brief presentation as to how I am going to go about measuring and estimating AES for the panel data set.

The meeting deliverables are:
  • Construct the ABS data set
  • Provide and overview to my fellow peers on how I will go about implementing AES using R and other tools

No comments: