vintage_policy#

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Axis vintage_policy on sub-layer l1_a (layer l1).

Sub-layer#

l1_a

Axis metadata#

  • Default: 'current_vintage'

  • Sweepable: False

  • Status: operational

Operational status summary#

  • Operational: 1 option(s)

  • Future: 1 option(s)

Options#

current_vintage – operational#

Use the latest available vintage of the dataset.

Loads the most recent FRED-MD/QD/SD snapshot bundled with the package. No real-time vintage tracking; revisions that happened after the snapshot date are not reflected.

This is the only operational option in v1.0. Real-time vintages (ALFRED-style) are tracked as a future axis – see GitHub issues #XXX.

When to use

Default for any pseudo-out-of-sample study using revised data.

When NOT to use

Real-time forecasting evaluations – those need ALFRED vintages (future feature; see real_time_alfred).

References

  • macroforecast design Part 1, L1: ‘data definition is the recipe layer that pins source, target, geography, and horizon – everything downstream branches off these choices.’

Related options: real_time_alfred, information_set_type

Last reviewed 2026-05-16 by macroforecast author.

real_time_alfred – future#

Real-time ALFRED vintage policy (not yet implemented).

ALFRED (Archival FRED) is the St. Louis Fed’s real-time data archive. It stores historical vintages of every FRED series, allowing researchers to reconstruct the information set that was actually available at any past date – before subsequent data revisions occurred.

Future macroforecast support will pull the historical-as-of vintage for each forecast origin from the ALFRED API, enabling true real-time replication studies where the model never sees data that was not yet released at the forecast origin.

Current behavior: selecting real_time_alfred raises a hard ValueError at recipe validation with the message 'real_time_alfred is not yet implemented; future feature. Use current_vintage (default).' (Cycle 14 K-4). No partial execution occurs.

When to use

Future. For now, use current_vintage and document the data-revision context via data_revision_tag in manifest provenance (Cycle 14 K-3 auto-captures fred-md@YYYY-MM).

When NOT to use

Any current recipe – this option is hard-rejected at validation in all released versions up to and including v0.9.x.

References

  • Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, ‘ALFRED: Archival Federal Reserve Economic Data’ – real-time vintage archive of FRED series. https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/

  • Croushore & Stark (2001) ‘A real-time data set for macroeconomists’, Journal of Econometrics 105(1). (doi:10.1016/S0304-4076(01)00072-0)

Related options: current_vintage

Last reviewed 2026-05-16 by macroforecast author.