Forecasting Demand of Agricultural Tractor, Riding Type Rice Transplanter and Combine Harvester by using an ARIMA Model

Abstract

Purpose: The goal of this study was to develop a methodology for the demand forecast of tractor, riding type rice transplanter and combine harvester using an ARIMA (autoregressive integrated moving average) model, one of time series analysis methods, and to forecast their demands from 2012 to 2021 in South Korea. Methods: To forecast the demands of three kinds of machines, ARIMA models were constructed by following three stages; identification, estimation and diagnose. Time series used were supply and stock of each machine and the analysis tool was SAS 9.2 for Windows XP. Results: Six final models, supply based ones and stock based ones for each machine, were constructed from 32 tentative models identified by examining the ACF (autocorrelation function) plots and the PACF (partial autocorrelation function) plots. All demand series forecasted by the final models showed increasing trends and fluctuations with two-year period. Conclusions: Some forecast results of this study are not applicable immediately due to periodic fluctuation and large variation. However, it can be advanced by incorporating treatment of outliers or combining with another forecast methods.