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).