Various ways of extracting macroeconomic information from a data-rich environment are compared with the objective of forecasting yield curves using the Nelson-Siegel model. Five issues in factor extraction are addressed, namely, selection of a subset of the available information, incorporation...

Factor construction methods are widely used to summarize a large panel of variables by means of a relatively small number of representative factors. We propose a novel factor construction procedure that enjoys the properties of robustness to outliers and of sparsity; that is, having relatively...