DaSSWeb, Data Science and Statistics Webinar ‘GOOGLE TRENDS: A NEW DATA SOURCE FOR RESEARCH ON ECONOMICS?’ EDUARDO COSTA Economics Ph.D. student at FEP doctoral programme July, 14, 2020, 14:30
Join us here<videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/95182035541>.
Abstract: The “big data” advent raised interest in using new sources of data to improve, describe, and track economic activities. As a relatively new source of data, the Google Trends (GT), launched
by Google in 2006, is a tool that provides updated reports on the relative demand for keywords, search-terms or search-categories via an index that represents the proportion of all searches
on Google from 2004 onwards for a particular search-term, given a geographical area and period. This sort of data, which is still under scrutiny, allows cost reduction, has a higher-frequency,
and realtime availability compared to traditional surveys.
Scientific research that uses GT data focusing on economic indicators is still embryonic; however, the literature points to promising results when predicting economic indicators such as GDP,
unemployment, private consumption, and price index. This talk aims at presenting how to obtain data from Google Trends, the mechanisms and economic indicators most used by the scientific
community when incorporating the GT data, and the preliminary findings on modeling the unemployment for Portugal.
Short Bio: Eduardo Costa is an Economics Ph.D. student at the FEP doctoral programme, holds an undergraduate degree in Statistics and a master in Production Engineering. His experience includes over
18 years of working for financial, insurance, energy and publishing companies focused on data mining, analysis, predictive models and consumer segmentation.