A Critical Study of Usefulness of Selected Functional Classifiers in Economics

Abstract

In this paper we conduct a critical analysis of the most popular functional classifiers. Moreover, we propose a new classifier for functional data. Some robustness properties of the functional classifiers are discussed as well. We can use an approach worked out in this paper to predict the expected state of the economy from aggregated Consumer Confidence Index (CCI, measuring consumers optimism) and Industrial Price Index (IPI, reflecting a degree of optimism in industry sector) exploiting not only scalar values of the indices but also the trajectories/shapes of functions describing the indices. Thus our considerations may be helpful in constructing a better economic barometer. As far as we know, this is the first comparison of functional classifiers with respect to a criterion of their usefulness in economic applications. The main result of the paper is a presentation of how a small fraction of outliers in a training sample, which are linearly independent from the training sample, consisting of almost linearly dependent functions, corrupt all analysed classifiers.

Keywords

• functional classifier
• functional data analysis
• robust methods
• economic optimism barometer