Arod's Wheelhouse

Overview

This page gathers commentary and tutorials related to analytics and applied methods used in support of litigation; and more.

Blog Posts

• Bootstrapping Individual Series — April 25, 2026

  Ok, so unemployment improved in March 2026 from 4.4 to 4.3; a change of -0.1. What we all want to know is whether the change is large enough to be a “real” or is it merely sampling variance. Is the economy shifting or is it just noise?

• Processing Imbalanced Data — January 17, 2026

  I show that rebalancing impairs the resulting fraud probabilities obtained from a binary classifier. I also explain and discuss Platt Scaling a popular remedy for the uncalibrated probability scores returned by the model.

• Dauberting Pearson — December 3, 2025

  A Daubert Challenge to the Pearson Correlation Coefficient

• CT Metro Area — June 6, 2024

  Text of a talk presented at the Connecticut CCIM Chapter mid-year Symposum, June 6, 2024

  There was no good ’ol days before the pandemic; not in Connecticut. We were limping along at best and appear poised for more of the same. And yes: the New Normal is the Old Normal.

• The Connecticut State Economic Index — November 10, 2024

  What's behind the CT Department of Labor's State Economic Index

• When Data Drifts — August 27, 2024

  Once data are disclosed it is not common practice for financial or economic experts to scrutinize the soundness of the data per se. But the data may be have changed - either deliberately or unintentionally. So it may be productive to run a few tests before starting any analysis.

• Confidence Intervals via Bootstrap for the Mean of a Population with Many Zero Values — August 2, 2023

  Data underlying practically all Medicaid Audits entail a population that contains a disproportionately large amount of zeros. A zero is booked when a particular filing is in compliance.
  This artifact is known as a zero-inflated population ("ZIP"). A medicare audit sample containing zero-inflated data results in a zero-inflated, highly skewed distribution. This non-conformity with normality assumptions weakens the theoretical statistical rationale underscoring the confidence intervals built into audit procedures. Here we show why this is a problem and how to use the bootstrap to obtain applicable confidence intervals

• Is There an Obligation to Scrutinize Data — July 16, 2023

  Data could be just the wrong one - an honest mistake. It could be a result of behavioral peccadilloes. It could be someone’s innocent penchant for rounding. Or it could be that the data is made up.

• Logistic vs LPM vs FFT vs OneR: a Fourway Mano a Mano — July 5, 2023

  Interrogating machine learning tools appears to have now been institutionalized by the General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR") in the European Union. This codifies peoples distrust of black-box algorithms and the associated "trust-me, I am the expert" culture surrounding it.
  What does this mean? Among other things, this will enhance the appeal of easier to understand algorithms and most-likely place a premium on human-in-the-loop decision-making processes. We offer a tour of the debate pitting the logistic model versus the linear probability model, the Fast & Frugal Tree, and the One Rule model

• Conjoint Analysis in the Courts: an R Tutorial — September 2022

  Conjoint analysis is a well established empirical technique used to quantify consumer choices. Specifically, with conjoint analysis one can quantitatively establish the relative importance of a product’s attributes; and within each attribute, the ranking of the attribute levels. It’s a workhorse in marketing. In litigation, it is used primarily in patent infringement and false claims cases.

• Has Connecticut Really Improved in Doing Business Rankings? — August 16, 2019

  Mining our meager labor productivity performance

• PMI AND GDP? THE DOL BUSINESS SCORECARD AND GDP? DO THEY CORRELATE FOR CONNECTICUT?" — August 16, 2019

  In search of tea leaves.

• Labor Productivity Performance and the Future of the Connecticut Economy — August 21, 2019

  Scrutinizing Connecticut’s position in CNBC’s America’s Top States for Business Rankings

• How Connecticut becomes the best state for business — October 28, 2018

  What can the next governor do to improve our future economic performance and thereby help increase Connecticut’s ranking to become the best state for business?

• Licensing Creep & Small Ball — March 16, 2018

  Ever expanding occupational licensing and licensing requirements is smothering labor market entry, handicapping labor mobility, and limiting economic opportunity in Connecticut – especially among minority groups.

• persistence and the land of steady habits — August 21, 2015

  A historical look at the unemployment performance for the state of Connecticut.

• Fear — June 10, 2015

  Appraising the economic fortunes of Connecticut, of UNH I feel like the guy in the Munch painting.

• Correlation is not Causation but it sure is a hint — November 09, 2014

  Pummeling Connecticut with Being-Last-in-the-Latest-Competitiveness-Index is not fun anymore.

• The Rankings Racket — September 08, 2014

  Assembling and serving up index numbers – and the attendant rankings is an artifact of sorts; something that can be easily manipulated to serve the interests or hidden agenda of the index creators.

• A Real Cool Hand — August 14, 2014

  If Connecticut were a movie character is would be Cool Hand Luke.

• Where Have All the Yutes Gone? — June 20, 2013

  First there was a brain drain. But by now kidneys, lungs, and all other organ parts have long blown the joint. The yutes of Connecticut are all gone

• Let them eat Keno — June 13, 2013

  Three different takes – same conclusion: Connecticut is flailing – badly.