Macroeconomic Predictions Using Payments Data and Machine Learning

Predicting the economy’s short-term dynamics—a vital input to economic agents’ decision-making process—often uses lagged indicators in linear models. This is typically sufficient during normal times but could prove inadequate during crisis periods such as COVID-19. This paper demonstrates: (a) that payments systems data which capture a variety of economic transactions can assist in estimating the state of the economy in real time and (b) that machine learning can provide a set of econometric tools to effectively handle a wide variety in payments data and capture sudden and large effects from a crisis. Further, we mitigate the interpretability and overfitting challenges of machine learning models by using the Shapley value-based approach to quantify the marginal contribution of payments data and by devising a novel cross-validation strategy tailored to macroeconomic prediction models.