Data patterns that reliably precede US recessions

This paper proposes a method of forecasting US recessions beginning with data displays that contain the last 12 quarters of seven US expansions. These end-of-expansion displays allow observers to see for themselves what is different about the last year before recessions compared with the two earlier years. Using a statistical model that treats this historical data as draws from a 12-dimensional multivariate normal distribution, the most recent data are probabilistically inserted into these images where the recent data are most like the historical data. This is a recession forecast based not on presumed patterns but on patterns revealed by the data.