Recent work by Medeiros et al. (2019, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics) shows that point forecasts of the random forest machine learning algorithm systematically outperform well-established benchmarks at predicting U.S. inflation. This article extends their work from point to density...

Random forest regression (RF) is an extremely popular tool for the analysis of high-dimensional data. Nonetheless, its benefits may be lessened in sparse settings, due to weak predictors, and a pre-estimation dimension reduction (targeting) step is required. We show that proper targeting...

In recent years, machine learning research has gained momentum: New developments in the field of deep learning allow for multiple levels of abstraction and are starting to supersede well-known and powerful tree-based techniques mainly operating on the original feature space. All these methods...

In proceeding beyond the generic optimal rotation model, forest economic research has applied variousspecifications that aim to circumvent the problems of high dimensionality. We specify an age- andsize-structured mixed-species optimal harvesting model with binary variables for harvest timing,...