Typical measures used to assess the state of an economy, such as gross domestic product (GDP) or inflation, are only determined after a delay and are subject to revision.
Nowcasting models have been applied most notably in Central Banks, who use the estimates to monitor the state of the economy in real-time as a proxy for official measures.
[4] Nowcast models can exploit information from a large quantity of data series at different frequencies and with different publication lags.
Nowcasting methods based on social media content (such as Twitter) have been developed to estimate hidden sentiment such as the 'mood' of a population[16] or the presence of a flu epidemic.
[2] Neither are official forecasts of the Federal Reserve regional bank, system, or the FOMC; nor do they incorporate human judgment.