Clustering techniques for the detection of Business Cycles

Abstract

In this paper business cycles are considered as a multivariate phenomenon and not as a univariate one determined e.g. by the GNP. The subject is to look for the number of phases of a business cycle, which can be motivated by the number of clusters in a given dataset of macro-economic variables. Different approaches to distances in the data are tried in a fuzzy cluster analysis to pursue this goal.