Machine Learning Macroeconometrics: A Primer

This Chapter reviews econometric methods that can be used in order to deal with the challenges of inference in high-dimensional empirical macro models with possibly “more parameters than observations”. These methods broadly include machine learning algorithms for Big Data, but also more traditional estimation algorithms for data with a short span of observations relative to the number of explanatory variables. While building mainly on a univariate linear regression setting, I show how machine learning ideas can be generalized to classes of models that are interesting to applied macroeconomists, such as time-varying parameter models and vector autoregressions.