Forecasting and Analyzing Internet Users of China with Lotka–Volterra Model

Abstract

In the background of big data era, the ability to accurately forecast the number of the Internet users has considerable implications for evaluating the growing trend of a newly-developed business. In this paper, we use four models, the Gompertz model, the Logistic model, the Bass model, and the Lotka–Volterra model, to forecast the Internet population in China with the historical data during 2007 to 2014. We compare the prediction accuracy of the four models using the criterions such as the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), the mean absolute error (MAE) and the root mean square error (RMSE). We find that the Lotka–Volterra model has the highest prediction accuracy. Moreover, we use the Lotka–Volterra model to investigate the relationship between the rural Internet users and the urban Internet users in China. The estimation results show that the relationship is commensalism.