{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/forecasting-unemployment-using-internet","title":"Forecasting unemployment using Internet search data via PRISM","arxiv_id":"2010.09958","date":"2020-10-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Dingdong Yi","Shaoyang Ning","Chia-Jung Chang","S. C. Kou"],"abstract":"Big data generated from the Internet offer great potential for predictive analysis. Here we focus on using online users' Internet search data to forecast unemployment initial claims weeks into the future, which provides timely insights into the direction of the economy. To this end, we present a novel method PRISM (Penalized Regression with Inferred Seasonality Module), which uses publicly available online search data from Google. PRISM is a semi-parametric method, motivated by a general state-space formulation, and employs nonparametric seasonal decomposition and penalized regression. For forecasting unemployment initial claims, PRISM outperforms all previously available methods, including forecasting during the 2008-2009 financial crisis period and near-future forecasting during the COVID-19 pandemic period, when unemployment initial claims both rose rapidly. The timely and accurate unemployment forecasts by PRISM could aid government agencies and financial institutions to assess the economic trend and make well-informed decisions, especially in the face of economic turbulence.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/2010.09958v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.09958v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"forecasting-unemployment-using-internet","repo_url":"https://github.com/ryanddyi/prism","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}