Optimizing Social Security Contributions for Spanish Self-Employed Workers: Combining Data Preprocessing and Ensemble Models for Accurate Revenue Estimation

Abstract

The Real Decreto-ley 13/2022 has amended the framework governing the calculation of Social Security contributions for Spanish self-employed workers. This framework obligates taxpayers to the annual revenue projection, under the possibility of lending money for free or paying unexpected taxes at the end of the year in the case of deviations. To address this issue, the Declarando firm has developed an algorithm to recommend the optimal contributions that combines a Simple Moving Average forecasting method with an offset-adjustment technique. This paper examines how this strategy can be improved by cleaning the input data and combining different forecasts using an Ensemble-based approach. After testing experimentally various alternatives, a promising strategy involves employing a median-based Ensemble on preprocessed data. Although this Ensemble-based approach significantly reduces forecasting errors, the improvements are diluted when the predictions are combined with the offset-adjustment process.