When are Google data useful to nowcast GDP: An approach via preselection and shrinkage
Speaker: Laurent Ferrara, SKEMA Business School
Coauthor: Anna Simoni, CNRS - CREST
Abstract
Alternative data sets are widely used for macroeconomic nowcasting together with machine learning-based tools. The latter are often applied without a complete picture of their theoretical nowcasting properties. Against this background, a theoretically grounded nowcasting methodology is proposed that allows researchers to incorporate alternative Google Search Data (GSD) among the predictors and that combines targeted preselection, Ridge regularization, and Generalized Cross Validation. Breaking with most existing literature, which focuses on asymptotic in-sample theoretical properties, we establish the theoretical out-of-sample properties of our methodology and support them with Monte-Carlo simulations. We apply our methodology to GSD to nowcast GDP growth rate of several countries during various economic periods. Our empirical findings support the idea that GSD tends to increase nowcasting accuracy, even after controlling for official variables, but that the gain differs between periods of recessions and of macroeconomic stability.
Explainable Performance
Speaker: Sébastien Saurin, University of Orléans
Coauthors: Sullivan Hué (Aix-Marseille University - Aix-Marseille School of Economics), Christophe Hurlin (University of Orléans), Christophe Pérignon (HEC Paris)
Abstract
We introduce the XPER (eXplainable PERformance) methodology to measure the specific contribution of the input features to the predictive or economic performance of a model. Our methodology offers several advantages. First, it is both model-agnostic and performance metric-agnostic. Second, XPER is theoretically founded as it is based on Shapley values. Third, the interpretation of the benchmark, which is inherent in any Shapley value decomposition, is meaningful in our context. Fourth, XPER is not plagued by model specification error, as it does not require re-estimating the model. Fifth, it can be implemented either at the model level or at the individual level. In an application based on auto loans, we find that performance can be explained by a surprisingly small number of features, XPER decompositions are rather stable across metrics, yet some feature contributions switch sign across metrics. Our analysis also shows that explaining model forecasts and model performance are two distinct tasks.