Colombian economic activity nowcasting: Addressing nonlinearities and high dimensionality through machine-learning

Economic decisions are made with high uncertainty about the current and recent past economic activity, due to the limited and imperfect available information. Therefore the following question arises: how can the accuracy of Colombian economic activity nowcasting be enhanced compared to traditional f...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Rincón Briceño, Juan José
Tipo de recurso: tesis de maestría
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:Colombia
Institución:Universidad de los Andes
Repositorio:Séneca: repositorio Uniandes
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.uniandes.edu.co:1992/75464
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/1992/75464
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Nowcasting
Forecasting
Economic activity
Macroeconomics
Machine learning
Risk aversion
Loss function
Economía
Descripción
Sumario:Economic decisions are made with high uncertainty about the current and recent past economic activity, due to the limited and imperfect available information. Therefore the following question arises: how can the accuracy of Colombian economic activity nowcasting be enhanced compared to traditional forecasting methods? This paper demonstrates: (a) using a risk-averse customized loss function that accounts for the agent disutility and penalizes directional discrepancies provides a useful alternative for assessing model performance by ensuring more accurate nowcasts, maximizing both precision and economic relevance. And (b) during periods of abrupt shocks and high volatility, such as the COVID-19 (2020–2021) and the post COVID-19 subsequent years (2022-2023), machine learning models outperform traditional nowcasting models.