Nowcasting

Nowcasting is often defined as the prediction of the present, the very near future and the very recent past. The plug-in developed at the National Bank of Belgium helps to operationalize the process of nowcasting. It can be used to specify and estimate dynamic factor models and visualize how the real-time dataflow updates expectations, as for instance in Banbura and Modugno (2010). The software can also be used to perform pseudo out-of-sample forecasting evaluations that consider the calendar of data releases, contributing to the formalization of the nowcasting problem originally proposed by Giannone, et al. (2008) or Evans (2005).

In the meantime the user can refer to the documentation provided with the nowcasting plug-in for version 2.2 and later.