Application of Web Query Information for Forecasting Korean Unemployment Rate

Unemployment is related to social issues as well as personal economics activity so various policies have been made to reduce the unemployment rate in many countries. Because of delay inherent in the survey mechanism to collect unemployment data, it takes lots of time to acquire survey unemployment data. To develop proper policies for reducing unemployment rate at the right time, it is quite critical to obtain faster and more accurate information concerning about unemployment level. To remedy this problem, recently an advanced analytics utilizing internet queries is suggested. To examine the potential of Web query information, this research investigates the usefulness of internet activity data to predict Korean unemployment rate. One of selected web-query data(unemployment claim) has a quite strong correlation with unemployment rate. This research employes a time series approach of the ARIMA model that utilizes the information of keyword queries provided by the Naver(Korean representative portal site) trend together with unemployment rate data provisioned from Statistics Korea. With respect to model selection guidelines of mean squared error and prediction error, the model with utilizing the web query information shows better results than the model without such information. This suggests that there is a strong potential for the used method, which needs to be further explored.