Time Series Analysis and Forecasting of Oilseeds Production in India: Using Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average and Group Method of Data Handling – Neural Network

Oilseeds have been the backbone of India’s agricultural economy since long. Oilseed crops play the second most important role in Indian agricultural economy, next to food grains, in terms of area and production. Oilseeds production in India has increased with time, however, the increasing demand for edible oils necessitated the imports in large quantities, leading to a substantial drain of foreign exchange. The need for addressing this deficit motivated a systematic study of the oilseeds economy to formulate appropriate strategies to bridge the demand-supply gap. In this study, an effort is made to forecast oilseeds production by using Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model, which is the most widely used model for forecasting time series. One of the main drawbacks of this model is the presumption of linearity. The Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH) model has also been applied for forecasting the oilseeds production because it contains nonlinear patterns. Both ARIMA and GMDH are mathematical models well-known for time series forecasting. The results obtained by the GMDH are compared with the results of ARIMA model. The comparison of modeling results shows that the GMDH model perform better than the ARIMA model in terms of mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and root mean square error (RMSE). The experimental results of both models indicate that the GMDH model is a powerful tool to handle the time series data and it provides a promising technique in time series forecasting methods.