Machine learning for regularized survey forecast combination: Partially-egalitarian LASSO and its derivatives

Despite the clear success of forecast combination in many economic environments, several important issues remain incompletely resolved. The issues relate to the selection of the set of forecasts to combine, and whether some form of additional regularization (e.g., shrinkage) is desirable. Against this background, and also considering the frequently-found good performance of simple-average combinations, we propose a LASSO-based procedure that...