Saturday, January 16, 2010

For the Wonks

Who is John Parker Burg? He did: J. P. Burg, "Maximum entropy spectral analysis," Ph.D. thesis, located here.

He is important because his algorithm is essentially what the economy performs. Using maximum entropy methods at each market in the production chain, the economy computes a maximum entropy spectral analysis of the economy, generating the yield curve.

The paper was fundamental, and based on Shannon information theory. But is contains the essential ingredients, namely a finite but variable number of system coefficients, the order of which is determined by the best trade-off between total residual and number of system variable.

I will be getting into this as I think the number of citations of this paper by the economics profession might increase.

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