Big data processing: Is there a framework suitable for economists and statisticians?

摘要

The emerging wave of Big Data applications is flooding all branches of scientific knowledge. Economic and statistical applied research carried out in central banks and policy advising institutions is no exception. In this paper we present one of the most promising platform providing a unifying framework for different researchers willing to harness their knowledge of popular and simple computing environment such as R and Python. Along with their Integrated Development Environment (IDE), these are two of the most used numerical computing framework which are open source, provide built-in capabilities for statistical analysis and include a wide array of user contributed packages for an ample set of analytical tools suitable for different scientific applications. In the Big Data framework, we show how to provide researchers with a suitable programming environment allowing them to tame the intrinsic complexity of a High Performance Computing Cluster. Here we provide few empirical applications based on classical econometric and machine learning modeling.