Journal of Data Science

Abstract. Unemployment is one of the most important issues in macro economics. Unemployment creates many economic and social problems in the economy. The condition and qualification of labor force in a country show economical developments. In the light of these facts, a developing country should overcome the problem of unemployment. In this study, the performance of robust biased Robust Ridge Regression (RRR), Robust Principal Component Regression (RPCR) and RSIMPLS methods are compared with each other and their classical versions known as Ridge Regression (RR), Principal Component Regression (PCR) and Partial Least Squares Regression (PLSR) in terms of predictive ability by using trimmed Root Mean Squared Error (TRMSE) statistic in case of both of multicollinearity and outliers existence in an unemployment data set of Turkey. Analysis results show that RRR model is chosen as the best model for determining unemployment rate in Turkey for the period of 1985-2012. Robust biased RRR method showed that the most important independent variable effecting the unemployment rate is Purchasing Power Parities (PPP). The least important variables effecting the unemployment rate are Import Growth Rate (IMP) and Export Growth Rate (EXP). Hence, any increment in PPP cause an important increment in unemployment rate, however, any increment in IMP causes an unimportant increase in unemployment rate. Any increment in EXP causes an unimportant decrease in unemployment rate.