| dc.description.abstract | –The potato is an extensively cultivated tuber
crop in the world. In Sri Lanka, cultivation has been
established in four regions: Nuwara Eliya, Badulla, Jaffna
and Puttalam. The objective of this paper is to analyze
and forecast the monthly potato production in Sri Lanka.
The monthly data from December 2005 to November
2017 were considered for this study and it consisted of
144 observations including 10 missing values. The missing
values were estimated using missing values imputation
techniques. Since the time series plot of potato yield
shows a clear seasonal pattern, it was decided to fit a
Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average
(SARIMA) model. The best fitted model was SARIMA
(0,0,1) (1,1,1)4 which resulted in the minimum Akaike’s
Information Criterion (AIC). It depicted the best
performance out of all the suspected models. The
forecasting accuracy of the above model was measured
with Mean Absolute Error (MAE) which was 1.67.
Therefore, it can be concluded that the SARIMAmodel is
accurate in predicting the monthly potato yield in Sri
Lanka. The model would be importantto all the stake
holders of potato cultivation in the country. | |
