IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/knz/dpteco/1420.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Forecasting Aggregates with Disaggregate Variables: Does Boosting Help to Select the Most Relevant Predictors?

Author

Listed:
  • Jing Zeng

    (Department of Economics, University of Konstanz, Germany)

Abstract

Including disaggregate variables or using information extracted from the disaggregate variables into a forecasting model for an economic aggregate may improve the forecasting accuracy. In this paper we suggest to use the boosting method to select the disaggregate variables which are most helpful in predicting an aggregate of interest. We conduct a simulation study to investigate the variable selection ability of this method. To assess the forecasting performance a recursive pseudo-out-of-sample forecasting experiment for six key Euro area macroeconomic variables is conducted. The results suggest that using boosting to select relevant predictors is a feasible and competitive approach in forecasting an aggregate.

Suggested Citation

  • Jing Zeng, 2014. "Forecasting Aggregates with Disaggregate Variables: Does Boosting Help to Select the Most Relevant Predictors?," Working Paper Series of the Department of Economics, University of Konstanz 2014-20, Department of Economics, University of Konstanz.
    • Handle: RePEc:knz:dpteco:1420
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/wiwi/workingpaperseries/WP_20_JingZeng_2014.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hendry, David & Hubrich, Kirstin, 2006. "Forecasting Economic Aggregates by Disaggregates," CEPR Discussion Papers 5485, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Jushan Bai & Serena Ng, 2002. "Determining the Number of Factors in Approximate Factor Models," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(1), pages 191-221, January.
    3. Klaus Wohlrabe & Teresa Buchen, 2014. "Assessing the Macroeconomic Forecasting Performance of Boosting: Evidence for the United States, the Euro Area and Germany," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 33(4), pages 231-242, July.
    4. Hendry, David F. & Hubrich, Kirstin, 2011. "Combining Disaggregate Forecasts or Combining Disaggregate Information to Forecast an Aggregate," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 29(2), pages 216-227.
    5. Buhlmann P. & Yu B., 2003. "Boosting With the L2 Loss: Regression and Classification," Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, vol. 98, pages 324-339, January.
    6. Buchen, Teresa & Wohlrabe, Klaus, 2011. "Forecasting with many predictors: Is boosting a viable alternative?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 113(1), pages 16-18, October.
    7. John F. Henry & L. Randall Wray, 1998. "Economic Time," Macroeconomics 9811004, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Stock, James H. & Watson, Mark W., 2006. "Forecasting with Many Predictors," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 10, pages 515-554, Elsevier.
    9. Andrea Carriero & George Kapetanios & Massimiliano Marcellino, 2011. "Forecasting large datasets with Bayesian reduced rank multivariate models," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 26(5), pages 735-761, August.
    10. Ivan Chang, Yuan-Chin & Huang, Yufen & Huang, Yu-Pai, 2010. "Early stopping in L2Boosting," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 54(10), pages 2203-2213, October.
    11. Marcellino, Massimiliano & Stock, James H. & Watson, Mark W., 2003. "Macroeconomic forecasting in the Euro area: Country specific versus area-wide information," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 47(1), pages 1-18, February.
    12. Souhaib Ben Taieb & Rob J Hyndman, 2014. "Boosting multi-step autoregressive forecasts," Monash Econometrics and Business Statistics Working Papers 13/14, Monash University, Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics.
    13. Nikolay Robinzonov & Gerhard Tutz & Torsten Hothorn, 2012. "Boosting techniques for nonlinear time series models," AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis, Springer;German Statistical Society, vol. 96(1), pages 99-122, January.
    14. Hubrich, Kirstin, 2005. "Forecasting euro area inflation: Does aggregating forecasts by HICP component improve forecast accuracy?," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 119-136.
    15. Jushan Bai & Serena Ng, 2009. "Boosting diffusion indices," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 24(4), pages 607-629.
    16. Tutz, Gerhard & Binder, Harald, 2007. "Boosting ridge regression," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 51(12), pages 6044-6059, August.
    17. Fagan, Gabriel & Henry, Jerome & Mestre, Ricardo, 2005. "An area-wide model for the euro area," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 39-59, January.
    18. Clifford M. Hurvich & Jeffrey S. Simonoff & Chih‐Ling Tsai, 1998. "Smoothing parameter selection in nonparametric regression using an improved Akaike information criterion," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 60(2), pages 271-293.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Guilherme Lindenmeyer & Pedro Pablo Skorin & Hudson da Silva Torrent, 2021. "Using boosting for forecasting electric energy consumption during a recession: a case study for the Brazilian State Rio Grande do Sul," Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences, Springer, vol. 14(2), pages 111-128, August.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Zeng, Jing, 2014. "Forecasting Aggregates with Disaggregate Variables: Does boosting help to select the most informative predictors?," VfS Annual Conference 2014 (Hamburg): Evidence-based Economic Policy 100310, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    2. Jing Zeng, 2015. "Combining Country-Specific Forecasts when Forecasting Euro Area Macroeconomic Aggregates," Working Paper Series of the Department of Economics, University of Konstanz 2015-11, Department of Economics, University of Konstanz.
    3. Gregor Bäurle & Elizabeth Steiner & Gabriel Züllig, 2021. "Forecasting the production side of GDP," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 40(3), pages 458-480, April.
    4. Wolfgang Nierhaus & Timo Wollmershäuser, 2016. "ifo Konjunkturumfragen und Konjunkturanalyse: Band II," ifo Forschungsberichte, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, number 72.
    5. Robert Lehmann & Klaus Wohlrabe, 2017. "Boosting and regional economic forecasting: the case of Germany," Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences, Springer, vol. 10(2), pages 161-175, July.
    6. Luciani, Matteo, 2014. "Forecasting with approximate dynamic factor models: The role of non-pervasive shocks," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 30(1), pages 20-29.
    7. Klaus Wohlrabe & Teresa Buchen, 2014. "Assessing the Macroeconomic Forecasting Performance of Boosting: Evidence for the United States, the Euro Area and Germany," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 33(4), pages 231-242, July.
    8. Andrejs Bessonovs, 2015. "Suite of Latvia's GDP forecasting models," Working Papers 2015/01, Latvijas Banka.
    9. Jing Zeng, 2016. "Combining country-specific forecasts when forecasting Euro area macroeconomic aggregates," Empirica, Springer;Austrian Institute for Economic Research;Austrian Economic Association, vol. 43(2), pages 415-444, May.
    10. Martin Feldkircher & Nico Hauzenberger, 2019. "How useful are time-varying parameter models for forecasting economic growth in CESEE?," Focus on European Economic Integration, Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian Central Bank), issue Q1/19, pages 29-48.
    11. Ivan Kitov & Oleg Kitov, 2013. "Does Banque de France control inflation and unemployment?," Papers 1311.1097, arXiv.org.
    12. Kirstin Hubrich & Guenter Beck & Massimiliano Marcellino, 2000. "Regional Inflation Dynamics within and across Euro Area Countries and a Comparison with the US," Regional and Urban Modeling 283600037, EcoMod.
    13. Döpke, Jörg & Fritsche, Ulrich & Pierdzioch, Christian, 2017. "Predicting recessions with boosted regression trees," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 33(4), pages 745-759.
    14. Kim, Hyun Hak & Swanson, Norman R., 2014. "Forecasting financial and macroeconomic variables using data reduction methods: New empirical evidence," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 178(P2), pages 352-367.
    15. Christian Pierdzioch & Marian Risse & Sebastian Rohloff, 2016. "A boosting approach to forecasting gold and silver returns: economic and statistical forecast evaluation," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 23(5), pages 347-352, March.
    16. Esteves, Paulo Soares, 2013. "Direct vs bottom–up approach when forecasting GDP: Reconciling literature results with institutional practice," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 416-420.
    17. Nicoletta Pashourtidou & Christos Papamichael & Charalampos Karagiannakis, 2018. "Forecasting economic activity in sectors of the Cypriot economy," Cyprus Economic Policy Review, University of Cyprus, Economics Research Centre, vol. 12(2), pages 24-66, December.
    18. Hyun Hak Kim, 2013. "Forecasting Macroeconomic Variables Using Data Dimension Reduction Methods: The Case of Korea," Working Papers 2013-26, Economic Research Institute, Bank of Korea.
    19. Lahiri, Kajal & Yang, Cheng, 2022. "Boosting tax revenues with mixed-frequency data in the aftermath of COVID-19: The case of New York," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(2), pages 545-566.
    20. Alessandro Girardi & Roberto Golinelli & Carmine Pappalardo, 2017. "The role of indicator selection in nowcasting euro-area GDP in pseudo-real time," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 53(1), pages 79-99, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    aggregation; macroeconomic forecasting; componentwise boosting; factor analysis;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C22 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Time-Series Models; Dynamic Quantile Regressions; Dynamic Treatment Effect Models; Diffusion Processes
    • C43 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Index Numbers and Aggregation
    • C52 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Model Evaluation, Validation, and Selection
    • C53 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Forecasting and Prediction Models; Simulation Methods
    • C82 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Data Collection and Data Estimation Methodology; Computer Programs - - - Methodology for Collecting, Estimating, and Organizing Macroeconomic Data; Data Access

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:knz:dpteco:1420. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Office Ursprung (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fwkonde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.