Predicting the Present Revisited: The Case of Thailand
Keywords:
Nowcasting, Google TrendsAbstract
Google is currently the most widely used search engine in the world. There are approximately 3.5 billion searches conducted on Google each day. With real-time processing, Google Trends data can be used in a prediction technique called ‘nowcasting’ (or “predicting the present”) – using current period real-time information to estimate current period indicators of interest. In this paper, we show how Google Trends can be used for nowcasting various Thai economic indicators. The areas analyzed are (i) the labor market sector (unemployment registration and unemployment rate), (ii) the real sector (automobile sales), and (iii) the financial sector (the SET index). The results revealed that incorporating Google Trends data into prediction models improved both the Adjusted R-Squared and predication accuracies under various measures.
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