Sunday, September 9, 2012

Nonfarm Payroll Forecast

I keep an eye on economic events often at Trading Economics, and Nonfarm Payroll's one of the more important stats for me. So the next logical though is to apply our own forecast instead of the values from 3rd party websites.

I got data from the US Department of Labor, (link to Nonfarm Payroll data). It is for the period Jan. 1990 to July 2012.


Forecast Method

A simple forecast was done by regression analysis. We match each month's number with the follow, and curve fit the scatter plot where the future value is the Y-axis, i.e. the Independent Variable.Turns out the 2nd degree Polynomial Fit has the highest R-Squared (at 0.67).




0 Reflections: