Hierarchical Shrinkage Priors for Dynamic Regressions with Many Predictors

This paper builds on a simple unified representation of shrinkage Bayes estimators based on hierarchical Normal-Gamma priors. Various popular penalized least squares estimators for shrinkage and selection in regression models can be recovered using this single hierarchical Bayes formulation. Using 129 U.S. macroeconomic quarterly variables for the period 1959 – 2010 I exhaustively evaluate the forecasting properties of Bayesian shrinkage in regressions with many predictors. Results show that for particular data series hierarchical shrinkage dominates factor model forecasts, and hence it becomes a valuable addition to existing methods for handling large dimensional data.Forecasting; shrinkage; factor model; variable selection; Bayesian LASSO