Temporal Disaggregation of GDP: When Does Machine Learning Help?

Yonggeun Jung

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We propose a modular framework for temporal disaggregation of quarterly GDP into monthly frequency, in which the regression step accommodates any supervised learning model while Mariano-Murasawa reconciliation enforces quarterly consistency. Comparing Chow-Lin, Elastic Net, XGBoost, and a Multi-Layer Perceptron across four countries, we find that regularization, not nonlinearity, drives the gains: Elastic Net achieves $R^2 = 0.87$ for the United States when lagged indicators are included, while nonlinear models cannot overcome the variance cost of small quarterly samples. We formalize this tradeoff through regime-switching bias and ridge-regularization results.

Date: 2025-06, Revised 2026-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big and nep-cmp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14078 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2506.14078

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().