The spirit of perfection

It has been over one year since I started the current research. It is an interesting project, besides that it is my first one. Looking back the times that I have gone through, progress has been made all along the way.

Knowing the ABC of Econometrics, I was very confident and felt urged to get into some area to build up my research experience, in the fall 2007. It was by chance that I got into the area of principal component analysis and later combining information via principal components. These methods are designed to filter information for the purpose of forecasting with the presence of large bulck of information. Our line of research is to argue that principal component analysis alone is inadequate to estimate the true unknown factors accurately to make the optimum forecast. That is why we are considering combining forecast after filtering information. And it has been a puzzle to researchers that the simplest forecast combination with equal weights turns out to be the optimum factor. Our research will shed light on this puzzle and move the economic and financial forecasting towards a brand new era. We have been and still are excited for this conjecture.

Indeed, our application results agree with our intuition and confirms that we should employ the information contained in the variable of interest to form better predicitons. All along the way up to now, we have been troubled by how to build up the theorectical results. For me, it is like on and off, since I have the course work and also some other research topics to work on. My co-author has similar situations with a lot of academic involvement. And recently, we started to understand the problem in a deeper and rather novel perspective, with the finding of the contraction mapping for the supervision parameter.

Out of all, what I have been impressed most since the start of the project is the persuit of perfection of my co-author. And I can feel the love that he devoted into the research. It is still clear to me the times when I was in depression due to the unsatisfactory results I had, the time when I feel frustrated because of the skindeep draft paper I wrote, the time when I feel tired because of the pressure to meet deadlines, the time when I have to leave the research for a while for other responsibilities of my course work, the time when I wanna go back China to visit my familiy. My co-author has always been supportive and encouraging me to do my personal best. Besides, his seemly never exhausting passion in the topic strikes right on me. I remember the time that he has been sitting up till 4'o clock in the morning to modify matlab code, that he was writing ideas relating that of weak exogeneity, that he is still working while he is sick. He is working much more than I am, and he is dedicated to the research much more than I am. He has taken the research as more than part of his life. His spirit moved me deeply. And I should work harder to be competive in my field.

I start to understand that in the process of scientific research, we are alone yet never lonely, with the spirit of perfection.