Big data analytics in economics: What have we learned so far, and where should we go from here?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Research into predictive accuracy testing remains at the forefront of the forecasting field. One reason for this is that rankings of predictive accuracy across alternative models, which under misspecification are loss function dependent, are universally utilized to assess the usefulness of econometric models. A second reason, which corresponds to the objective of this paper, is that researchers are currently focusing considerable attention on so‐called big data and on new (and old) tools that are available for the analysis of this data. One of the objectives in this field is the assessment of whether big data leads to improvement in forecast accuracy. In this survey paper, we discuss some of the latest (and most interesting) methods currently available for analyzing and utilizing big data when the objective is improved prediction. Our discussion includes a summary of various so‐called dimension reduction, shrinkage and machine learning methods as well as a summary of recent tools that are useful for ranking prediction models associated with the implementation of these methods. We also provide a brief empirical illustration of big data in action, in which we show that big data are indeed useful when predicting the term structure of interest rates.
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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 | 0.020 | 0.049 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.029 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".