Forecasting the direction of the Fed's monetary policy decisions using random forest

The federal funds target rate is commonly considered to be an important indicator of the state of the US economy and is of keen interest to individual investors, financial firms, and other economic agents. In this paper, we focus on the discrete changes in the federal funds target rate during the period from January 1994 to June 2022 and apply the ordinal forest model, a random forest-based prediction method for ordinal response variable. We examine the model's performance with 45 predictor variables which include macroeconomic and financial variables as well as forward-looking survey measures. For an accurate and honest measure of the model performance, we employ single-period-ahead out-of-sample forecasting accuracy instead of evaluating the in-sample fit. Our empirical results show the ordinal forest method significantly outperforms a benchmark that uses the most recent data among previous studies on federal funds target rate. We find that TB spread is the most informative from a forecasting perspective along with GDP, initial jobless claims, and survey measures.