Forecast combinations in machine learning

This paper introduces novel methods to combine forecasts made by machine learning techniques. Machine learning methods have found many successful applications in predicting the response variable. However, they ignore model uncertainty when the relationship between the response variable and the predi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: QIU, Yue, XIE, Tian, Jun YU
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/2379
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soe_research/article/3378/viewcontent/mlf_v05b_.pdf
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Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:This paper introduces novel methods to combine forecasts made by machine learning techniques. Machine learning methods have found many successful applications in predicting the response variable. However, they ignore model uncertainty when the relationship between the response variable and the predictors is nonlinear. To further improve the forecasting performance, we propose a general framework to combine multiple forecasts from machine learning techniques. Simulation studies show that the proposed machine-learning-based forecast combinations work well. In empirical applications to forecast key macroeconomic and financial variables, we find that the proposed methods can produce more accurate forecasts than individual machine learning techniques and the simple average method, later of which is known as hard to beat in the literature.