Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is an indicator used to mea- sure the total market value of all final goods and services produced within a national territory during a given period. This is an essential indicator for formulating macroeconomic policies. This study presents a classical machine learning algorithm to forecast GDP in countries from 2013 to 2018 (with Economic Freedom Index’s Predicting GPD dataset). We use the Feature importance technique and incorporate other methods such as PCA and KBest; simultaneously, we tune the hyperparameters for the model to have more optimal results. We compare the predictive accu- racy of Random Forest (RF) with other classical models such as Support Vector Machines (SVM). We find that RF KBest outperforms RF and SVM. The forecast accuracy is measured by R2 has reached 0.904 in pre- dicting GDP in 186 countries. This study encourages increasing the use of machine learning models in macroeconomic forecasting. Besides, we present GDP growth rates (as a percentage) by region. We also analyze and find some critical factors that can significantly affect GDP, such as Freedom from Corruption, Property rights, and the unemployment rate.
Tạp chí khoa học Trường Đại học Cần Thơ
Lầu 4, Nhà Điều Hành, Khu II, đường 3/2, P. Xuân Khánh, Q. Ninh Kiều, TP. Cần Thơ
Điện thoại: (0292) 3 872 157; Email: tapchidhct@ctu.edu.vn
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