We nowcast world trade using machine learning, distinguishing between tree-based methods (random forest, gradient boosting) and their regression-based counterparts (macroeconomic random forest, linear gradient boosting). While much less used in the literature, the latter are found to outperform...

Today's economy is characterized by increased competition, faster product development and increased product differentiation. As a consequence product lifecycles become shorter and demand patterns become more volatile which especially affects the retail industry. This new situation imposes...

Scientific, political and bureaucratic elites use epistemic practices like “big data analysis” and “web scraping” to create representations of the citizenry and to legitimize policymaking. I develop the concept of “demos scraping” for these practices of gaining information about...

KI-Modelle und Machine-Learning-Anwendungen halten Einzug in die alltägliche Praxis von Unternehmen und können mitbestimmt werden. Um die Interessen und Rechte der Beschäftigten zu berücksichtigen und zu schützen, sollten die aktuellen Regelungen in betrieblichen IT-Vereinbarungen...

Building predictive models for genomic mining requires feature selection, as an essential preliminary step to reduce the large number of variable available. Feature selection is a process to select a subset of features which is the most essential for the intended tasks such as classification,...

Nowcasting has been a challenge in the recent economic crisis. We introduce the Toll Index, a new monthly indicator for business cycle forecasting and demonstrate its relevance using German data. The index measures the monthly transportation activity performed by heavy transport vehicles across...

This paper applies the Model Confidence Set (MCS) procedure of Hansen, Lunde, and Nason (2003) to a set of volatility models. A MCS is analogous to confidence interval of a parameter in the sense that the former contains the best forecasting model with a certain probability. The key to the MCS...

Survival ratios and death rates for chronic conditions can be estimated from successive, cross-sectional surveys when the condition and the age of onset are obtained. Survival ratios use the estimated population in the first survey period as the denominator and the estimated number of survivors...

When evaluating the significance of calendar effects, such as those associated with Monday and January, it is necessary to control for all possible calendar effects to avoid spurious results. The downside of having to control for a large number of possible calendar effects is that it diminish...

Stock picking is the field of financial analysis that is of particular interest for many professional investors and researchers. In this study stock picking is implemented via binary classification trees. Optimal tree size is believed to be the crucial factor in forecasting performance of the...