We produce a social unrest risk index for 125 countries covering a period of 1996 to 2020. The risk of social unrest is based on the probability of unrest in the following year derived from a machine learning model drawing on over 340 indicators covering a wide range of macro-financial,...

Purpose - Developing price forecasts for various agricultural commodities has long been a significant undertaking for a variety of agricultural market players. The weekly wholesale price of edible oil in the Chinese market over a ten-year period, from January 1, 2010 to January 3, 2020, is the...

This paper revisits the accuracy of inflation forecasting using activity and expectations variables. We apply Bayesian model averaging across different regression specifications selected from a set of potential predictors that includes lagged values of inflation, a host of real activity data,...

The back-propagation neural network (BPN) model has been the most popular form of artificial neural network model used for forecasting, particularly in economics and finance. It is a static (feed-forward) model which has a learning process in both hidden and output layers. In this paper, we...

Artificial neural network modeling has recently attracted much attention as a new technique for estimation and forecasting in economics and finance. The chief advantages of this new approach are that such models can usually find a solution for very complex problems, and that they are free from...

A vector time series model of the form A(L)y(t)+B(L)x(t)=e(t), is known as a vector autoregressive model with exogenous variables (VARX model) and involves a regressand vector y(t) and a regressor vector x(t). This chapter provides a method for the recursive fitting of subset VARX models. It...

In this chapter, a procedure is presented to use the bootstrap in choosing the best approximation in terms of forecasting performance for the equivalent state-space representation of a vector autoregressive model. It is found that the proposed procedure, which uses each approximant's forecasting...

The necessary and sufficient condition to test for 'overall causality', i.e., the presence of Granger-causality and instantaneous causal relations, in a bivariate and trivariate autoregressive model with recursive form is discussed. It is argued that the conventional AR model (the reduced form...

This chapter uses a modified block Choleski decomposition method and tree pruning algorithms to attain the best multivariate subset autoregression for each size (number of non-zero coefficient matrices). Model selection criteria are then employed to select the optimum multivariate subset AR. A...

The difficulty in modelling inflation and the significance in discovering the underlying data generating process of inflation is expressed in an ample literature regarding inflation forecasting. In this paper we evaluate nonlinear machine learning and econometric methodologies in forecasting the...