Since December 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has plagued the world for more than a year now. The total number of confirmed cases has passed the 10 million mark, and the death toll has reached 2.44 million. The current global case-fatality ratio (CFR) is about 2.2%.

CFR is defined as the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases.

The good news is the daily number of confirmed cases around the world has shown an obvious sign of decline. Figure 1 shows that the daily number of confirmed cases has dropped from the peak of 733,764 cases on January…

Undoubtedly, everyone would be benefited from knowing the future. Everyday, we plan our activities by referring to the weather forecasts. It reflects how important a prediction is. If you invest, no matter in stocks, real estate, bonds or commodities, price prediction is the way to make profit.

However, the difficulties of making accurate predictions are commonly recognized. In financial theory, unpredictable prices is considered an evidence of an efficient market — Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH).

Post-dictions

But this article is not about predictions, but post-dictions. A new term invented here to discuss about a kind of forecast of something happened…

Automation versus Machine Learning — Text-to-Speech versus Speech-to-Text Apps

Do you want to write an app to read your text automatically? That is a text-to-speech app. It just requires 2 blocks of coding because it does NOT require machine learning algorithms, and is just an automated process.

Automation and machine learning can both be considered intelligence, but the former is the intelligence of the programmer, while the latter is the intelligence of the machine. However, they can easily be mixed up. I have defined automation as the 1st generation of intelligence, and learning as the 4th generation of intelligence since 2006 (Yiu, 2019).

The definitions are easy to spell…

The title looks like a self-contradictory statement. If a machine can learn, why we have to learn machine learning? If we want to writing coding, how come can we code without learning coding?

The 5th generation of artificial intelligence

Why we still have to learn machine learning? It is because so far artificial learning is still at its 4th generation (Yiu, 2019). We have started from the 1st generation which focused on automation to the 4th generation which emphasizes machine learning. These two approaches are exactly the opposite. Automation requires a hard-wired instruction (rules) provided by the programmer. Machine Learning, on the contrary, tries to identify…

Are you looking for some simple videos on how to do machine learning? I found that they are either descriptive materials which tell us what is machine learning and how powerful it can be (WIRED, 2019), or they require a lot of programming knowledge to understand what they are doing, such as coding by Pythons. It is hard for a kid to learn machine learning and experience training a machine.

Thus, I try to find something in-between, which does not require any programming (coding) knowledge, and easy to acquire hands-on experience. …

[This article is also published at the BigQ]

Median housing prices across New Zealand increased by 19.8% year-on-year (YOY) in October 2020. It is one of the largest price surges in the world as shown in Figure 1. However, the sudden common rebound of house prices in most of the developed economies during the pandemic is mind-blowing as the economies are encountering unprecedented recessions. As the rebounds are almost synchronised after the outbreak of the pandemic, it provides a natural experiment to test the alternative hypotheses on the causes of house price changes.

First, Figure 1 compares the latest YOY…

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” — Milton Friedman

“He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation” — James A. Garfield

Old Definition of Money

Before 1971, when most of the currencies were backed by commodities, such as gold or silver, it was not so easy to substantially increase currency supply. However, since the abandonment of the Bretton Woods Agreement and the Gold Standard, currencies in the world have become “fiat”. Central Banks have increased trillions of currency after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 pandemic. Figure 1 shows the total assets of the US…

It is an endless debate on the causes of housing price change. Among them, there are two main strands of argument, viz. (1) housing supply and (2) money supply. This article does not discuss about their theoretical justifications, as we have done a lot before (Yiu, 2020). Instead, I am going to update a recent empirical evidence on this debate.

House Supply and House Prices

Taghizadeh-Hesary, Yoshino and Chiu (2019) of ADBI analyze a time series dataset in 1999–2018 of macroeconomic variables and housing prices in Hong Kong, with both housing supply factors and money supply factors. They find that, among others, “housing supply has…