Design of a Regional Economic Forecasting Model Using Optimal Nonlinear Support Vector Machines

Forecasting regional economic activity is a progressively significant element of regional economic research. Regional economic prediction can directly assist local, national, and subnational policymakers. Regional economic activity forecast can be employed for defining macroeconomic forces, such as prediction of stock market and cyclicality of national labor market movement. The recent advances of machine learning (ML) models can be employed to solve the time series prediction problem. Since the parameters involved in the ML model considerably influence the performance, the parameter tuning process also becomes essential. With this motivation, this study develops a quasioppositional cuckoo search algorithm (QOCSA) with a nonlinear support vector machine (SVM)-based prediction model, called QOCSO-NLSVM for regional economic prediction. The goal of the QOCSO-NLSVM technique is to identify the present regional economic status. The QOCSO-NLSVM technique has different stages such as clustering, preprocessing, prediction, and optimization. Besides, the QOCSO-NLSVM technique employs the density-based clustering algorithm (DBSCAN) to determine identical states depending upon the per capita NSDP growth trends and socio-economic-demographic features in a state. Moreover, the NLSVM model is employed for the time series prediction process and the parameters involved in it are optimally tuned by the use of the QOCSO algorithm. To showcase the effective performance of the QOCSO-NLSVM technique, a wide range of simulations take place using regional economic data. To determine the current economic situation in a region, the QOCSO-NLSVM technique is used. The simulation results reported the better performance of the QOCSO-NLSVM technique over recent approaches. The QOCSO-NLSVM technique generated effective results with a minimal mean square error of 70.548 or greater. Astonishingly good results were obtained using the QOCSO-NLSVM approach, which had the lowest root mean square error (RMSE) of 8.399.