An empirical confirmation of the superior performance of MIDAS over ARIMAX

Abstract

© Springer International Publishing AG 2016. A new model (MIDAS) for forecasting economic data has been proposed recently to take into account of more relevant information than the ARIMAX model. However, in order to convince econometricians to use MIDAS instead of ARIMAX, at least some evidence from empirical studies is needed, to indicate that the forecast performance of MIDAS is superior than that of ARIMAX. Our present work precisely aims at filling this need. In doing so, we also investigate a practical problem: Forecasting export growth in Thailand. Our empirical findings confirm that the MIDAS regression model significantly improves the forecast accuracy when compared with the ARIMAX model.