Month: February 2020

Occupancy rate is the ratio of rented or used space to the total amount of available space. Analysts use occupancy rates when discussing senior housing, hospitals, bed-and-breakfasts, hotels, and rental units, among other categories. In a call center, occupancy rate refers to the amount of time agents spend on calls compared to their total working hours.

An unsecured loan is a loan that is issued and supported only by the borrower’s creditworthiness, rather than by any type of collateral. Unsecured loans—sometimes referred to as signature loans or personal loans—are approved without the use of property or other assets as collateral. The terms of such loans, including approval and receipt, are therefore most often contingent on the borrower’s credit score. Typically, borrowers must have high credit scores to be approved for certain unsecured loans. A credit score is a numerical representation of a borrower’s ability to pay back debt and reflects a consumer’s creditworthiness based on their credit history.

GNF is the currency abbreviation for the Guinea franc, the national currency of the Republic of Guinea, a country in West Africa.

A rival good is a type of good that may only be possessed or consumed by a single user. These items can be durable, meaning they may only be used one at a time, or nondurable, meaning they are destroyed after consumption, allowing only one user to enjoy it. When a good is rival in consumption, competition for the rival good can occur as in the case of people bidding to buy a particular house.

Labor market flexibility is an important part of the labor market. It allows companies to make certain decisions about changing their labor force as a response to fluctuations in the market and to help boost production.

Overfitting is a modeling error that occurs when a function is too closely fit to a limited set of data points. Overfitting the model generally takes the form of making an overly complex model to explain idiosyncrasies in the data under study.

A lender is an individual, a public or private group, or a financial institution that makes funds available to another with the expectation that the funds will be repaid. Repayment will include the payment of any interest or fees. Repayment may occur in increments (as in monthly mortgage payment) or as a lump sum.

An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miner is a device that is designed for the sole purpose of mining—not coal, but rather digital currency. Generally, each ASIC miner is constructed to mine a specific digital currency. So, a Bitcoin ASIC miner can mine only bitcoin. Think of Bitcoin ASICs as specialized Bitcoin mining computers, or “bitcoin generators.”

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a measure that examines the weighted average of prices of a basket of consumer goods and services, such as transportation, food, and medical care. It is calculated by taking price changes for each item in the predetermined basket of goods and averaging them. Changes in the CPI are used to assess price changes associated with the cost of living. The CPI is one of the most frequently used statistics for identifying periods of inflation or deflation.