Working Paper

On the Aggregation of Probability Assessments: Regularized Mixtures of Predictive Densities for Eurozone Inflation and Real Interest Rates

Abstract: We propose methods for constructing regularized mixtures of density forecasts. We explore a variety of objectives and regularization penalties, and we use them in a substantive exploration of Eurozone inflation and real interest rate density forecasts. All individual inflation forecasters (even the ex post best forecaster) are outperformed by our regularized mixtures. From the Great Recession onward, the optimal regularization tends to move density forecasts’ probability mass from the centers to the tails, correcting for overconfidence.

Keywords: Density forecasts; forecast combinations; survey forecasts; shrinkage; model selection; regularization; partially egalitarian LASSO; model averaging; subset averaging;

JEL Classification: C2; C5; C8;

https://doi.org/10.21799/frbp.wp.2021.06

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Part of Series: Working Papers

Publication Date: 2021-02-12

Number: 21-06