Forecasting Canadian GDP Growth with Machine Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper applies state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) algorithms to forecast monthly real GDP growth in Canada by using both Google Trends (GT) data and official macroeconomic data (which are available ahead of the release of GDP data by Statistics Canada). We show that we can forecast real GDP growth accurately ahead of the release of GDP figures by using GT and official data (such as employment) as predictors. We first pre-select features by applying up-to-date techniques, namely XGBoost's variable importance score, and a recent variable-screening procedure for time series data, namely, PDC-SIS+. These pre-selected features are then used to build advanced ML models for forecasting real GDP growth, by employing tree-based ensemble algorithms, such as XGBoost, LightGBM, Random Forest, and GBM. We provide empirical evidence that the variables pre-selected by either PDC-SIS+ or the XGBoost's variable importance score can have a superior forecasting ability. We find that the pre-selected GT data features perform as well as the pre-selected official data features with respect to short-term forecasting ability, while the pre-selected official data features are superior with respect to long-term forecasting ability. We also find that (1) the ML algorithms we employ often perform better with a large smaple than with a small sample, even when the small sample has a larger set of predictors; and (2) the Random Forest (that often produces nonlinear models to capture nonlinear patterns in the data) tends to under-perform a standard autoregressive model in several cases while there is no clear evidence that the XGBoost and the LightGBM can always outperform each other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 teacher head, 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".