No abstract

The Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone (GDELT) is a real time large scale database of global human society for open research which monitors worlds broadcast, print, and web news, creating a free open platform for computing on the entire world’s media. In this work, we first describe a data crawler, which collects metadata of the GDELT database in real-time and stores them in a big data management system based on Elasticsearch, a popular and efficient search engine relying on the Lucene library. Then, by exploiting and engineering the detailed information of each news encoded in GDELT, we build indicators capturing investor’s emotions which are useful to analyse the sovereign bond market in Italy. By using regression analysis and by exploiting the power of Gradient Boosting models from machine learning, we find that the features extracted from GDELT improve the forecast of country government yield spread, relative that of a baseline regression where only conventional regressors are included. The improvement in the fitting is particularly relevant during the period government crisis in May-December 2018.

This chapter is an introduction to the use of data science technologies in the fields of economics and finance. The recent explosion in computation and information technology in the past decade has made available vast amounts of data in various domains, which has been referred to as Big Data. In economics and finance, in particular, tapping into these data brings research and business closer together, as data generated in ordinary economic activity can be used towards effective and personalized models. In this context, the recent use of data science technologies for economics and finance provides mutual benefits to both scientists and professionals, improving forecasting and nowcasting for several kinds of applications. This chapter introduces the subject through underlying technical challenges such as data handling and protection, modeling, integration, and interpretation. It also outlines some of the common issues in economic modeling with data science technologies and surveys the relevant big data management and analytics solutions, motivating the use of data science methods in economics and finance.

No abstract

No abstract