Sparse Factor Auto-Regression for Forecasting Macroeconomic Time Series with Very Many Predictors

Forecasting a univariate target time series in high dimensions with very many predictors poses challenges in statistical learning and modeling. First, many nuisance time series exist and need to be removed. Second, from economic theories, a macroeconomic target series is typically driven by few latent factors constructed from some macroeconomic indices. Consequently, a high dimensional problem arises where deleting junk time series and constructing predictive factors simultaneously, are meaningful and advantageous for accuracy of the forecasting task. In macroeconomics, multiple categories are available with the target series belonging to one of them. With all series available we advocate constructing category level factors to enhance the performance of the forecasting task. We introduce a novel methodology, the Sparse Factor Auto-Regression (SFAR) methodology, to construct predictive factors from a reduced set of relevant time series. SFAR attains dimension reduction via joint variable selection and rank reduction in high dimensional time series data. A multivariate setting is used to achieve simultaneous low rank and cardinality control on the matrix of coefficients where $ell_{0}$-constraint regulates the number of useful series and the rank constrain elucidates the upper bound for constructed factors. The doubly-constrained matrix is a nonconvex mathematical problem optimized via an efficient iterative algorithm with a theoretical guarantee of convergence. SFAR fits factors using a sparse low rank matrix in response to a target category series. Forecasting is then performed using lagged observations and shrinkage methods. We generate a finite sample data to verify our theoretical findings via a comparative study of the SFAR. We also analyze real-world macroeconomic time series data to demonstrate the usage of the SFAR in practice.