Athena: A Flexible Econometric Querying Tool

Abstract

Here, we presentAthena: a statistical querying tool that can perform advancedeconometric analysis using natural language queries.Contemporary economic analysis is done mainly using tools like Stata, R, and(sometimes) Python. These tools require expertise to master, and consequentlythey are inaccessible to many students and individuals without the requisite guid-ance or training. Athena provides an alternative method of statistical and econo-metric exploration, free of arcane syntactic requirements. In this work, we outlinethe application: its construction, design, and usage. The product utilizes context-free-grammars for semantic parsing and its statistical engine is expansive –– con-taining a plethora of econometric functionality. Additionally, Athena can reasonabout unseen data and is capable of some machine learning and data visualiza-tion.Ultimately, Athena is a creation of many academic research areas and encom-passes domains from natural language understanding to automated instrumentselection. This project is open source and can be viewed on my github.