Artificial Intelligence and Economic Growth

This paper describes the use of five machine learning methods for predicting economic growth based on a country's attributes and presents a comparison of their prediction accuracy.The methods used are four neural network (NN) methods with different activation functions, and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost).Their performance is compared in terms of their ability to predict the economic growth rate using three measures (prediction accuracy rate, area under the curve (AUC) value, and F-score).The results obtained can be summarized as follows: 1) XGBoost outperforms the NNs in terms of prediction accuracy and F-score for original data; 2) data standardization enhances the reliability of NNs, improving their prediction accuracy, AUC-value, and F-score; 3) XGBoost has smaller standard deviation of prediction accuracy rate than that of NNs; and 4) "Political institution", "Investment and its composition", "Colonial history", and "Trade" are important factors for cross-country economic growth.