Related papers: Nowcasting in a Pandemic using Non-Parametric Mixe…
State-space mixed-frequency vector autoregressions are now widely used for nowcasting. Despite their popularity, estimating such models can be computationally intensive, especially for large systems with stochastic volatility. To tackle the…
We introduce a new method of nowcasting using regression on path signatures. Path signatures capture the geometric properties of sequential data. Because signatures embed observations in continuous time, they naturally handle mixed…
This paper proposes a Vector Autoregression augmented with nonlinear factors that are modeled nonparametrically using regression trees. There are four main advantages of our model. First, modeling potential nonlinearities nonparametrically…
This article investigates factor-augmented sparse MIDAS (Mixed Data Sampling) regressions for high-dimensional time series data, which may be observed at different frequencies. Our novel approach integrates sparse and dense dimensionality…
Vector autoregressive (VAR) models assume linearity between the endogenous variables and their lags. This assumption might be overly restrictive and could have a deleterious impact on forecasting accuracy. As a solution, we propose…
The shocks which hit macroeconomic models such as Vector Autoregressions (VARs) have the potential to be non-Gaussian, exhibiting asymmetries and fat tails. This consideration motivates the VAR developed in this paper which uses a Dirichlet…
There is currently an increasing interest in large vector autoregressive (VAR) models. VARs are popular tools for macroeconomic forecasting and use of larger models has been demonstrated to often improve the forecasting ability compared to…
Nowcasting can play a key role in giving policymakers timelier insight to data published with a significant time lag, such as final GDP figures. Currently, there are a plethora of methodologies and approaches for practitioners to choose…
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the increasing need of policymakers for timely estimates of macroeconomic variables. A prior UNCTAD research paper examined the suitability of long short-term memory artificial neural networks (LSTM)…
We investigate ensembling techniques in forecasting and examine their potential for use in nonseasonal time-series similar to those in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Developing improved forecast methods is essential as they…
Recent economic events, including the global financial crisis and COVID-19 pandemic, have exposed limitations in linear Factor Augmented Vector Autoregressive (FAVAR) models for forecasting and structural analysis. Nonlinear dimension…
In light of widespread evidence of parameter instability in macroeconomic models, many time-varying parameter (TVP) models have been proposed. This paper proposes a nonparametric TVP-VAR model using Bayesian additive regression trees (BART)…
Structured additive distributional regression models offer a versatile framework for estimating complete conditional distributions by relating all parameters of a parametric distribution to covariates. Although these models efficiently…
This paper extends the canonical model of epidemiology, the SIRD model, to allow for time-varying parameters for real-time measurement and prediction of the trajectory of the Covid-19 pandemic. Time variation in model parameters is captured…
The COVID-19 recession that started in March 2020 led to an unprecedented decline in economic activity across the globe. To fight this recession, policy makers in central banks engaged in expansionary monetary policy. This paper asks…
We discuss the issue of estimating large-scale vector autoregressive (VAR) models with stochastic volatility in real-time situations where data are sampled at different frequencies. In the case of a large VAR with stochastic volatility, the…
The COVID-19 pandemic provides new motivation for a classic problem in epidemiology: estimating the empirical rate of transmission during an outbreak (formally, the time-varying reproduction number) from case counts. While standard methods…
This paper introduces non-linear dimension reduction in factor-augmented vector autoregressions to analyze the effects of different economic shocks. I argue that controlling for non-linearities between a large-dimensional dataset and the…
We propose a novel framework for analyzing multivariate time series (MTS) data by integrating non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) with vector autoregression (VAR). Termed NMF-VAR, this method models the coefficient matrix of NMF as a…
In this work, we contribute the first visual open-source empirical study on human behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to investigate how compliant a general population is to mask-wearing-related public-health policy.…