Capstone: The Nowcasting Dashboard

The course converges on one artifact: a live nowcasting dashboard that

1. pulls fresh data on a schedule — FRED/ALFRED macro releases, Google Trends, and the sentiment index built in Practicum 3;
2. produces a current-quarter U.S. GDP nowcast with honest uncertainty bands (quantile or conformal), updated as releases arrive;
3. decomposes every revision into news — which release moved the nowcast, by how much;
4. backtests against archived vintages — the model is scored on what it would have said with the data available at the time, not on revised history;
5. benchmarks against the professionals — the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow and the NY Fed Staff Nowcast, plotted on the same axes, scored with the same rules (RMSE for the point nowcast, calibration for the bands).

The instructor build of this dashboard is developed in the open as the course’s benchmark example — the standard a student capstone is measured against, and a standing demonstration that the course’s methods survive contact with real, ragged, revised data.

Status: in development. The instructor build will live at nowcast.tylersotomayor.com.