Kristóf Németh, Dániel Hadházi
arXiv 12 Apr 2023 · Econometrics · publishedJournal of Forecasting (2025) · 1 citations (OpenAlex)
arXiv:2304.05805 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
We apply artificial neural networks (ANNs) to nowcast quarterly GDP growth for the U.S. economy. Using the monthly FRED-MD database, we compare the nowcasting performance of five different ANN architectures: the multilayer perceptron (MLP), the one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D CNN), the Elman recurrent neural network (RNN), the long short-term memory network (LSTM), and the gated recurrent unit (GRU). The empirical analysis presents results from two distinctively different evaluation periods. The first (2012:Q1 -- 2019:Q4) is characterized by balanced economic growth, while the second (2012:Q1 -- 2024:Q2) also includes periods of the COVID-19 recession. During the first evaluation period, longer input sequences slightly improve nowcasting performance for some ANNs, but the best accuracy is still achieved with 8-month-long input sequences at the end of the nowcasting window. Results from the second test period depict the role of long-term memory even more clearly. The MLP, the 1D CNN, and the Elman RNN work best with 8-month-long input sequences at each step of the nowcasting window. The relatively weak performance of the gated RNNs also suggests that architectural features enabling long-term memory do not result in more accurate nowcasts for GDP growth. The combined results indicate that the 1D CNN seems to represent a “sweet spot” between the simple time-agnostic MLP and the more complex (gated) RNNs. The network generates nearly as accurate nowcasts as the best competitor for the first test period, while it achieves the overall best accuracy during the second evaluation period. Consequently, as a first in the literature, we propose the application of the 1D CNN for economic nowcasting.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Giannone, Domenico, Reichlin, Lucrezia, Small, David (2008) Nowcasting: The real-time informational content of macroeconomic data | 1.000 | 9 | 4 | 100% |
| 2 | Ekman, Magnus (2021) Learning Deep Learning: Theory and Practice of Neural Networks, Computer Vision, NLP, and Transformers Using TensorFlow | 0.874 | 9 | 2 | 100% |
| 3 | Diebold, Francis X, Mariano, Roberto S (1995) Comparing Predictive Accuracy | 0.860 | 11 | 4 | 64% |
| 4 | Chung, Junyoung, Gulcehre, Caglar, Cho, KyungHyun, Bengio, Yoshua (2014) Empirical evaluation of gated recurrent neural networks on sequence modeling | 0.811 | 4 | 2 | 100% |
| 5 | Goodfellow, Ian, Bengio, Yoshua, Courville, Aaron (2016) Deep Learning | 0.811 | 4 | 2 | 100% |
| 6 | Loermann, Julius, Maas, Benedikt (2019) Nowcasting US GDP with artificial neural networks | 0.811 | 4 | 2 | 100% |
| 7 | McCracken, Michael W, Ng, Serena (2016) FRED-MD: A monthly database for macroeconomic research | 0.737 | 4 | 2 | 75% |
| 8 | Hochreiter, Sepp, Schmidhuber, Jürgen (1997) Long short-term memory | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 9 | Fulton, Chad, Augspurger, Tom, Sheppard, Kevin, Morton, Jamie (2024) Dynamic factors and coincident indices | 0.693 | 5 | 1 | 100% |
| 10 | Botha, Byron, Olds, Tim, Reid, Geordie, Steenkamp, Daan, Jaarsveld,… (2021) Nowcasting South African gross domestic product using a suite of statistical models | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
Showing the top 10 of 44 scored citations.