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Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 14th May 2024, 11:32:55am EDT

 
 
Session Overview
Session
Track W7-5: Return Predictability
Time:
Wednesday, 22/May/2024:
1:45pm - 2:30pm

Session Chair: Benjamin Golez, University of Notre Dame
Discussant: Alberto Martin-Utrera, Iowa State University
Location: Room 610


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Presentations

Economic Forecasts Using Many Noises

Yuan Liao1, Xinjie Ma2, Andreas Neuhierl3, Zhentao Shi4

1Rutgers University; 2National University of Singapore; 3Washington University at St Louis; 4Chinese Universith of Hong Kong

This paper addresses a key question in economic forecasting: does pure noise truly lack predictive power? Economists typically conduct variable selection to eliminate noises from predictors. Yet, we prove a compelling result that in most economic forecasts, the inclusion of noises in predictions yields greater benefits than its exclusion. Furthermore, if the total number of predictors is not sufficiently large, intentionally adding more noises yields superior forecast performance, out- performing benchmark predictors relying on dimension reduction. The intuition lies in economic predictive signals being densely distributed among regression coef- ficients, maintaining modest forecast bias while diversifying away overall variance, even when a significant proportion of predictors constitute pure noises. One of our empirical demonstrations shows that intentionally adding 300 ∼ 6, 000 pure noises to the Welch and Goyal (2008) dataset achieves a noteworthy 10% out-of-sample R2 accuracy in forecasting the annual U.S. equity premium. The performance sur- passes the majority of sophisticated machine learning models.


Liao-Economic Forecasts Using Many Noises-839.pdf


 
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