In many macroeconomic forecasting applications factor models are used to cope with large datasets. This study aligns variational autoencoders with macroeconomic factor modeling and proposes an extension to adapt this framework for forecasting exercises. Variational autoencoders are well suited...

Artificial neural networks have become increasingly popular for statistical model fitting over the last years, mainly due to increasing computational power. In this paper, an introduction to the use of artificial neural network (ANN) regression models is given. The problem of predicting the GDP...