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

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