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Determinants of households´ consumption in Portugal - a machine learning approach

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Bibliographic Details
Summary:Machine Learning has been widely adopted by researchers in several academic fields.Although at a slow pace, the field of economics has also started to acknowledge the pos-sibilities of these algorithm based methods for complementing or even replace traditionalEconometric approaches. This research aims to apply Machine Learning data-driven variable selection models for accessing the determinants of Portuguese households’ consumption using the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. I found that LASSO Regression and Elastic Net have the best performance in this setting and that wealth related variables have the highest impact on households’ consumption levels, followed by income, household’s characteristics and debt and consumption credit.
Main Authors:Noro, Catarina Vieira
Subject:Machine learning algorithms Feature selection Lasso regression Elastic
Year:2021
Country:Portugal
Document type:master thesis
Access type:open access
Associated institution:Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Language:English
Origin:Repositório Institucional da UNL
Description
Summary:Machine Learning has been widely adopted by researchers in several academic fields.Although at a slow pace, the field of economics has also started to acknowledge the pos-sibilities of these algorithm based methods for complementing or even replace traditionalEconometric approaches. This research aims to apply Machine Learning data-driven variable selection models for accessing the determinants of Portuguese households’ consumption using the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. I found that LASSO Regression and Elastic Net have the best performance in this setting and that wealth related variables have the highest impact on households’ consumption levels, followed by income, household’s characteristics and debt and consumption credit.