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Short-term forecasting of demographic trends based on Google Trends data

Demographic indicators are important functions of state programs for the development of Russia, operational monitoring of demographic development is the key to the successful implementation of programs. Very often, government statistics data are published with a delay, which does not allow their use for operational monitoring and planning. In this work, the approach allows for the rapid assessment of demographic processes in the field of formation and forecasting of demographic trends in the short term based on data from query statistics from Google Trends. The relationships between the search queries and demographics are analyzed using Pearson's correlation. The analysis uses annual (total fertility rate, abortions per 100 births, abortions per 1000 women, marriages and divorces per 1000 population) and monthly data (number of births, number of marriages and divorces) by birth, marriages and abortions with and without lags. The analysis is carried out on data for Russia as a whole and for the eight most populated regions: Moscow, Moscow Region, Krasnodar Territory, St. Petersburg, Rostov Region, Sverdlovsk Region, Republic of Tatarstan, Republic of Bashkortostan. Using the temporal metrics available in Google Trends since 2004, some demographics can be predicted based on data from related queries to the Google search algorithm using the ARIMA model. Thus, it is possible to use query data as a supplement to demographic data, when building multiple regression models for demographic calculations, or use it as a proxy variable. Read more...