Nowcasting of Indonesia's Gross Domestic Product Using Mixed Sampling Data Regression and Google Trends Data

This study aims to compare the results of the GDP nowcasting of the accommodation and food service activities sector without and with the pandemic time using the MIDAS method. The MIDAS method is an econometric approach used to predict economic development using real-time available high-level and low-frequency data. In this study, Google Trend acts as a predictor variable consisting of 16 search categories which are then reduced by Principal Component Analysis, resulting in several principal components. For GDP data, the data period collected is Quarter I 2010 to Quarter I 2023. This period will later be partitioned into the period before the COVID-19 pandemic, namely Quarter I 2010 to Quarter IV 2019 and a combined period, namely Quarter I 2010 to Quarter I of 2023. This partition was carried out to see the performance and sensitivity of the model before and after the shock due to the COVID-19 pandemic. From the models that have been made, nowcasting is carried out and it is found that the RMSE and MAE values for the pre-pandemic model are smaller than the combined model. The RMSE values for each of the pre-pandemic and combined models were 0.005753 and 0.056032 and the MAE values were 0.00359 and 0.048976 for the pre-pandemic and combined models. However, from this study it is not advisable to make predictions on the nominal GDP of the accommodation and food service activities sector because the results of the nowcasting predictions are still far from the actual value, but can be a reference if you want to predict the growth direction of the accommodation and food service activities sector.