How Useful Is Bagging in Forecasting Economic Time Series? A Case Study of U.S. Consumer Price Inflation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article focuses on the widely studied question of whether the inclusion of indicators of real economic activity lowers the prediction mean squared error of forecasting models of U.S. consumer price inflation. We propose three variants of the bagging algorithm specifically designed for this type of forecasting problem and evaluate their empirical performance. Although bagging predictors in our application are clearly more accurate than equally weighted forecasts, median forecasts, ARM forecasts, AFTER forecasts, or Bayesian forecast averages based on one extra predictor at a time, they are generally about as accurate as the Bayesian shrinkage predictor, the ridge regression predictor, the iterated LASSO predictor, or the Bayesian model average predictor based on random subsets of extra predictors. Our results show that bagging can achieve large reductions in prediction mean-squared errors even in such challenging applications as inflation forecasting; however, bagging is not the only method capable of achieving such gains.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".