As evidence of the impact already, Guido Imbens and I attracted over 250 economics professors to an NBER session on a Saturday afternoon last summer, where we covered machine learning for economists, and everywhere I present about this topic to economists, I attract large crowds. read more
Supervised machine learning typically entails using a set of “features” or “covariates” (x’s) to predict an outcome (y). There are a variety of ML methods, such as LASSO (see Victor Chernozhukov (MIT) and coauthors who have brought this into economics), random forest, regression trees, support vector machines, etc. read more