Maximally Forward-Looking Core Inflation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Coulombe, Philippe Goulet, Klieber, Karin, Barrette, Christophe, Goebel, Maximilian
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Coulombe, Philippe Goulet
Klieber, Karin
Barrette, Christophe
Goebel, Maximilian
author_facet Coulombe, Philippe Goulet
Klieber, Karin
Barrette, Christophe
Goebel, Maximilian
contents Timely monetary policy decision-making requires timely core inflation measures. We create a new core inflation series that is explicitly designed to succeed at that goal. Precisely, we introduce the Assemblage Regression, a generalized nonnegative ridge regression problem that optimizes the price index's subcomponent weights such that the aggregate is maximally predictive of future headline inflation. Ordering subcomponents according to their rank in each period switches the algorithm to be learning supervised trimmed inflation - or, put differently, the maximally forward-looking summary statistic of the realized price changes distribution. In an extensive out-of-sample forecasting experiment for the US and the euro area, we find substantial improvements for signaling medium-term inflation developments in both the pre- and post-Covid years. Those coming from the supervised trimmed version are particularly striking, and are attributable to a highly asymmetric trimming which contrasts with conventional indicators. We also find that this metric was indicating first upward pressures on inflation as early as mid-2020 and quickly captured the turning point in 2022. We also consider extensions, like assembling inflation from geographical regions, trimmed temporal aggregation, and building core measures specialized for either upside or downside inflation risks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_05209
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Maximally Forward-Looking Core Inflation
Coulombe, Philippe Goulet
Klieber, Karin
Barrette, Christophe
Goebel, Maximilian
Econometrics
Machine Learning
Timely monetary policy decision-making requires timely core inflation measures. We create a new core inflation series that is explicitly designed to succeed at that goal. Precisely, we introduce the Assemblage Regression, a generalized nonnegative ridge regression problem that optimizes the price index's subcomponent weights such that the aggregate is maximally predictive of future headline inflation. Ordering subcomponents according to their rank in each period switches the algorithm to be learning supervised trimmed inflation - or, put differently, the maximally forward-looking summary statistic of the realized price changes distribution. In an extensive out-of-sample forecasting experiment for the US and the euro area, we find substantial improvements for signaling medium-term inflation developments in both the pre- and post-Covid years. Those coming from the supervised trimmed version are particularly striking, and are attributable to a highly asymmetric trimming which contrasts with conventional indicators. We also find that this metric was indicating first upward pressures on inflation as early as mid-2020 and quickly captured the turning point in 2022. We also consider extensions, like assembling inflation from geographical regions, trimmed temporal aggregation, and building core measures specialized for either upside or downside inflation risks.
title Maximally Forward-Looking Core Inflation
topic Econometrics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05209