SNAPSHOT
TAXBRAIN ARMS CITIZEN DATA SCIENTISTS
WITH THE POWER TO EVALUATE TAX POLICIES
The Open Source Policy Center builds powerful and
transparent policy predictive models with Anaconda
THE CHALLENGE
Working with a large dataset, the team at TaxBrain needed
technology that would allow their mathematically intensive economic
simulation models to be fast, efficient and easy to access for open
source contributors.
THE SOLUTION
TaxBrain is able to hit performance goals and maintain stronger
relationships with open source contributors through the use of the
Anaconda platform for development, hosting, package management
and performance acceleration.
Anaconda Speeds Up Open Source Policy Modeling 95X
The Open Source Policy Center (OSPC), housed at the American Enterprise Institute,
was born out of a single, seemingly simple idea: empower everyday people to contribute
to government policies and economic change through open source methods and tools,
making policy analysis more transparent, trustworthy and collaborative.
TaxBrain is the first brainchild of the OSPC and was created as a Python-based web
application that uses the open source micro-simulation model, Tax Calculator. TaxBrain
enables everyone to see the effects of potential tax policy reforms in real time, using open
source modeling technology. TaxBrain is helping to make tax policy analysis accessible to
anyone and creates transparency around policies that affect tax reform. The use of open
source approaches in TaxBrain creates an outstanding example of how open source can
help to make all policy analysis more scientific and democratic.
TaxBrain uses a dataset that closely reproduces the multivariate distribution of income,
deduction and credit items from 2009, extrapolated to 2015-2026 levels in accordance
with the Congressional Budget Office forecasts of macroeconomic aggregates available
in Spring 2016. Analyzing and iterating on all of this data interactively via the web
creates a challenging performance issue. In order to make sure performance levels were
achieved, the TaxBrain team reached out to Continuum Analytics, who is known for high
performance Python. Anaconda includes Numba, an open source just-in-time compiler
for Python that delivered the performance results required by TaxBrain. Numba uses the
LLVM compiler runtime to change Python bytecode to machine code to execute Python
functions at native machine speeds. To achieve the target performance, the team employed
a multi-node parallelism strategy to divide and conquer the computationally intensive
workloads. This combination sped up execution significantly, resulting in almost 100X
faster performance increase within TaxBrain model simulations.
“Continuum believes in our
mission and in the Open
Data Science movement.
Anaconda has empowered
us to create an application
that demonstrates how
open source methods can
make government policy
analysis more transparent,
collaborative and
accessible. Moreover, the
Anaconda community has
connected us with many
open source contributors
to improve and expand
our projects at OSPC.”
— Matthew Jensen
Managing Director of the OSPC
Anaconda Makes Data Science Contributions Easy for TaxBrain
TaxBrain, at its core, encourages people to become involved with an open source project
that will make the world around them more democratic. The PyData stack, including
Anaconda, conda and Numba, made this vision possible. Anaconda, with its extensive,
engaged community, has allowed TaxBrain to tap a vast group of contributors in the
PyData community to accelerate the total number of open source economic models.
Contributions come quickly from the PyData community and, because of Anaconda, are
easy to integrate into TaxBrain.
“The PyData ecosystem made a lot of sense to us. The community quickly adapted to the
framework because of their familiarity with Anaconda,” said Matt Jensen, Managing
Director of the OSPC. “The package management within Anaconda made it easy to
absorb new community contributors. These model contributions immediately benefit
from the performance gains of Numba, while being easy to maintain and deploy into the
TaxBrain application.”
When deciding what technologies to use within TaxBrain, Jensen looked to Continuum
Analytics CEO and co-founder Travis Oliphant for wisdom in running successful open
source projects with wide-reaching communities. After hearing about the mission of
TaxBrain, Oliphant knew they needed abilities only Anaconda could deliver and he
connected Jensen with experts on high performance Python at Continuum Analytics.
“The team at Continuum Analytics has been tremendously helpful in integrating
Anaconda and Numba into our application,” Jensen said. “I knew I was getting the best
help out there and the best products to work with, since Anaconda is so widely loved and
used by the open source community.”
Open Sourcing Government Policy
While TaxBrain is still getting its legs in the open source community, the OSPC has
big dreams for where their technology will take the world. Jensen describes their main
goal as “helping other people.” By taking experiences and lessons learned through their
implementation and maintenance of TaxBrain, Jensen hopes to build out their policy
models and collaborate with other contributors to make even more policy analysis
transparent and open.
“This is the beginning of making government transparent and accessible,” Jensen said.
“We are now focused on getting more contributors to help us find better techniques and
methods to improve policy outcomes.”
TaxBrain is only the beginning of a much larger movement to use open source approaches
in policy and government. Through the use of Anaconda, the OSPC is able to empower
a growing community with the superpowers necessary to promote change in the way we
think about democratic policy reform.
About Continuum Analytics
Continuum Analytics’ Anaconda is the leading open data science platform powered
by Python. We put superpowers into the hands of people who are changing the world.
Anaconda is trusted by leading businesses worldwide and across industries – financial
services, government, health and life sciences, technology, retail & CPG, oil & gas – to solve
the world’s most challenging problems. Anaconda helps data science teams discover, analyze,
and collaborate by connecting their curiosity and experience with data. With Anaconda,
teams manage open data science environments and harness the power of the latest open
source analytic and technology innovations. Visit www.continuum.io.
About TaxBrain and the Open
Source Policy Center (OSPC)
TaxBrain is a web application that lets
individuals — journalists, economists,
and citizens — study the effect of
tax policy reforms using open source
economic simulation models. TaxBrain
makes tax policy analysis transparent
and accessible. This is an example of
how an open source approach can
make all kinds of policy analysis more
scientific and democratic.
The OSPC is making policy analysis
more transparent, trustworthy and
collaborative by supporting open
source projects that build cutting edge
economic models. The OSPC’s initial
focus is supporting community driven
projects that model and analyze the
budgetary and broader economic
impact of taxes. These models are
completely transparent, freely available
to researchers across the country and
made accessible through an easy-touse online web application, TaxBrain.
This application allows students,
policymakers, journalists and informed
citizens to interact with the models and
learn for themselves about the effects
of policies.
Want to contribute to
TaxBrain? Explore the
policy model, share your
results, join the mailing list
and report your findings
or suggestions at
www.ospc.org/taxbrain