A Fresh Approach to Forecasting Mortgages: Developing New Models in Mathematica

Bernard Gress, Financial Economist, Fannie Mae

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The Mathematica Edge
  • Represents everything—mathematical formulas, data, lists, graphics, documents, and more—as expressions
  • Provides a single, unified framework for developing and prototyping new ideas and models
  • Contains integrated symbolic computation for error-free workflow
"I think there's no question Mathematica is the superior platform for this kind of project and development of this project."

Overview

Fannie Mae financial economist Bernard Gress is taking an innovative approach to predicting the stability of mortgages. He's using Mathematica to create a genetic algorithm system that simultaneously finds the optimal model structure and the optimal dataset to use to make a final prediction.

He says Mathematica is the superior platform for developing this project. "Mathematica, because it uses expressions for the fundamental structure of all of its operations, and those expressions are directly manipulatable, that allows instantly, right off the bat, saves years of work right there," says Gress. "You visualize your data and parts of the function you're generating much easier. You can focus on where the issues are much quicker, so I think those are the advantages of Mathematica for me."


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