“…A comprehensive review is presented in Bańbura et al (2013). as the output and most inputs exhibit non-normal distributions and appear to display some degree of heteroscedasticity (see Table 6, figures 6 and 7, in Appendix). Finally, ANNs have proven to be very effective in time series prediction problems, even better than standard econometric approaches (see Kohzadi et al, 1995, Zhang et al, 1999, Misas et al, 2003, McNelis, 2005, Jalil & Misas, 2006, Han & Kamber, 2006, Chaudhuri & Ghosh, 2016, Di Piazza et al, 2016. This is key in our case because, again, nowcasting is a prediction task.…”