Describing Location Shifts with One Class Support Vector Machines

The evolution of variables during location shifts (structural breaks) is of high interest to policy makers. I propose a novel approach to describe location shifts. I use two business surveys in the industry sector (faster soft indicators) to target the industrial production index (a slower hard indicator). Then I use One-Class Support Vector Machines on combinations of these two variables to identify if new observations act as ’novelties’ for the target variable, as observations coming from a different distribution. In that case, one would expect the onset/end of a location shift. Moreover, that gives insights into what role animal spirit, as manifested in survey data, plays in equilibrium formation (location shifts).