A concise review towards a novel target specific multi-source unsupervised transfer learning technique for GDP estimation using CO2 emission data

Though economic growths of most of the nations have seen exponential rise due to industrialization, it has also caused proportional increase in their carbon emissions. This paper exploits this proportionate relationship of carbon emission with GDP to predict the per-capita GDP of those nations whose GDP values are missing in the world bank database. The reason behind the same was, those countries were either war-torn or politically isolated/unstable. To achieve the objective of predicting the missing GDP values of those countries from their carbon emissions, this paper exploits the non-linear relationship among the carbon emissions from solid fuels, liquid fuels, and gaseous fuels. It is so because even the differential utilization of these fuels impact economy differently. Use of traditional solid fuel for cooking points toward energy poverty, and access to clean cooking gas indicates higher living standard. However, the available data from the war-torn or isolated countries are very little, and hence insufficient for building a robust predictive machine learning model. So, this paper employs multi-source unsupervised transfer learning to precisely estimate the missing per-capita GDP of those nations. It suitably enlarges the training domains for the prediction models to be more robust. We empirically evaluate the proposed methodology for different regression techniques to estimate the missing GDP values of eleven different nations belonging to diverse strata of economies viz. developed economies, developing, and/or least developing economies. Proposed methodology profoundly improves the prediction preciseness of these regression techniques in estimating the missing per-capita GDP of the considered nations.