ASU professors produce pioneer research “I was discussing foreign exchange in one of my economics classes,” says Dr. Brauer, professor of economics in the Hull College of Business. “After class, a student told me that what I lectured on sounded similar to something Neal Wagner had talked about in one of his classes.” Curious, Dr. Brauer phoned Dr. Wagner, assistant professor of computer science in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. The two decided to work together and combine the research that Dr. Brauer had put together on U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) with a forecasting technique created by Dr. Wagner. “The forecasting technique is based on an evolutionary algorithm, which in general uses Darwin’s theory of evolution as a way of designing programs,” Dr. Wagner says. “In this particular case, I used the evolution algorithm to design a program that would forecast U.S. GDP over an eight-year period from 1995-2003.” The professors took old U.S. GDP data from 1946-1995 and used Dr. Wagner’s program to analyze that data and forecast for the eight-year period. What they found was that when comparing this new technique with other statistical techniques commonly used by economists, Dr. Wagner’s method beat the others by quite a bit.
Dr. Brauer presented the research at a conference in Greece in June and was invited in September to present at the Turkish Economic Association International Conference on Economics in Ankara, Turkey. He helped organize three of the invited sessions and took the opportunity to make his and Dr. Wagner’s research known. “The sponsors of the conference were very prestigious, and the president of Turkey was there as well,” says Dr. Brauer. “I even shook his hand and was taken aback. The research was well-received.” In fact, at the Greece conference, their paper was selected to be published in the Defence and Peace Economics Journal. “It’s very nice because they only select a few papers from the whole conference, and ours was one of them,” Dr. Wagner explains. Dr. Wagner adds that he and Dr. Brauer plan on continuing their research and possibly forecasting Turkey’s GDP. “That will be extremely interesting because Turkey has had a hard time detecting their GDP.” Dr. Wagner is an expert on evolutionary algorithms, computational forecasting, bioinformatics, and adaptive business application. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Asheville and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Dr. Brauer earned a bachelor’s degree from the Free University of Berlin and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Notre Dame. He is internationally regarded as an expert on economic development and military affairs. Other News Stories:
November 2006 |
If it weren’t for a curious student, Jurgen Brauer and Neal Wagner may never have met and pioneered research that has garnered international attention.
