Measuring the unemployment rate

The unemployment rate is defined as the percentage of the total labor force that is unemployed, but actively seeking employment and willing to work. As defined by the International Labor Organization (ILO), an unemployed person is someone who is actively looking for work but does not have a job. The unemployment rate is a measure of the number of people who are both jobless and looking for a job.

Getting ready

In order to perform a measurement of the unemployment rate using neural networks, we shall be using a dataset collected on the unemployment rate in Wisconsin.

Step 1 - collecting and describing data

For this, we will be using a CSV dataset titled FRED-WIUR.csv. There are 448 rows of data. There are two numeric variables as follows:

• Date
• Value

This dataset shows the unemployment rate in Wisconsin between January 1, 1976 and April 1, 2013.

How to do it...

Let's get into the details.

Step 2 - exploring data

First, the following...