News-based forecasts of macroeconomic indicators: A semantic path model for interpretable predictions

The macroeconomic climate influences operations with regard to, e.g., raw material prices, financing, supply chain utilization and demand quotas. In order to adapt to the economic environment, decision-makers across the public and private sectors require accurate forecasts of the economic outlook. Existing predictive frameworks base their forecasts primarily on time series analysis, as well as the judgments of experts. As a consequence, current approaches are often biased and prone to error. In order to reduce forecast errors, this paper presents an innovative methodology that extends lag variables with unstructured data in the form of financial news: (1) we apply a variety of models from machine learning to word counts as a high-dimensional input. However, this approach suffers from low interpretability and overfitting, motivating the following remedies. (2) We follow the intuition that the economic climate is driven by general sentiments and suggest a projection of words onto latent semantic structures as a means of feature engineering. (3) We propose a semantic path model, together with estimation technique based on regularization, in order to yield full interpretability of the forecasts. We demonstrate the predictive performance of our approach by utilizing 80,813 ad hoc announcements in order to make long-term forecasts of up to 24 months ahead regarding key macroeconomic indicators. Back-testing reveals a considerable reduction in forecast errors.     

Choosing the best set of variables in regression analysis using integer programming

This paper is concerned with an algorithm for selecting the best set of s variables out of k(> s) candidate variables in a multiple linear regression model. We employ absolute deviation as the measure of deviation and solve the resulting optimization problem by using 0-1 integer programming methodologies. In addition, we will propose a heuristic algorithm to obtain a close to optimal set of variables in terms of squared deviation. Computational results show that this method is practical and reliable for determining the best set of variables.