Estimation of the manufacturing industry sub-sectors’ capacity utilization rates using support vector machines

Abstract

Capacity utilization rate is one of the most important indicators of the efficiency of the manufacturing industry, andtherefore of the return of the investments made. Estimation of these rates accurately renders it possible to make importanteconomic decisions such as taking sectorial investment decisions, defining the optimal distribution of sectorial credits,determining non-competitive sectors, making development plans and developing unemployment policies. In this study, weestimated the capacity utilization rates of 21 sub-sectors of the Turkish manufacturing industry using support vectormachines and compared the results with the results obtained from the methods of artificial neural networks and vectorauto-regression. This study is the first in the literature in that it was carried out using this method.