TRAIN Scholar Evelyn Rivera Elias' Blog

  I can't believe that the semester and 2022-23 academic year are coming to a close so quickly! This year went by incredibly fast but so much has happened, from presenting at the ANAS conference to applying to ASU. All great experiences with more to come in the Spring semester! I am more anticipating presenting this semester since I have learned a lot of new skills from my public speaking class from how to create an organized speech outline to having effective visual aids. My presentation skills were a skill set I really wanted to improve on so I hope my presentation will turn out well, especially since the background information for my project is a bit complicated to explain, let alone understand. I am more concerned about explaining economics than machine learning since it seems like a good chunk of other scholars have a machine learning-related project as well.  I think I will focus more on the what then the why when it comes to inflation since there are a lot of factors th...

  Two weeks ago, I attended the information session for the ASU West Train program. It was such a great informational session and I was admittedly intimidated at first and almost skipped attending it. Despite being less than two semesters away from transferring, it still feels like a huge step from being a community college student.  I am very glad to have attended as it was a very welcoming event, I got to ask current scholars about their experience, as well as get advice from professors. One of the professors who has her degree in Applied Mathematics said she is so passionate about math as it is foundational for understanding life itself, which is the same philosophy that I share as well. Hearing her beliefs made me feel more comfortable about transferring and being a math major overall.  During the session, I asked the professors what they would have done differently during their graduate school years slash what they wish they would have known beforehand. I was expecti...

  This semester has flown by, it feels like just yesterday we had the orientation meeting. Since there are only two weeks left for the TraIN semester I thought I might as well do them all ahead of time.  There have been some setbacks on the project, mainly due to me feeling unwell and missing some lab hours but I'm hoping to put in more hours since we are on the right track now. One of the minor setbacks was our data because it wasn't stationary, or in other words unseasonal. We have been looking at an example of an ARIMA model that modeled inflation rates in Poland, which has relatively stable & nonseasonal data, unlike the United States.  I had assumed that the rates of inflation would be relatively chaotic because I assumed that Poland was also majorly affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine but I didn't take into account the holidays. There are only a handful of major holidays that Poland celebrates compared to the U.S., so there were some sizeable gaps left w...

  These past few weeks I have found more sources related to my topic. I'm not sure if my keywords when I was researching my background and proposal were too broad or too specific but I have found journal articles on the same or similar subject. From what I have read so far, other researchers have successfully created an accurate algorithm, so there's hope that ours will work as well.  Some of the articles focused on the economy in other countries such as India and Ukraine, which made me think about whether or not there's a way to input data about crises into the algorithm. Especially since war and disease outbreaks heavily impact a country's economy. The sources related to Ukraine stated that their purpose for creating the algorithm was because of the war with Russia and some of the journal articles about the United States mentioned COVID-19's impact. This idea might be too advanced but I don't think it'd be impossible in the future.  Scholarly articles asid...