Forecasting Pistachio Production in Turkey: A Comparison of ARIMA, Grey, and Exponential Smoothing Models

Abstract

This research aims to forecast pistachio production in Turkey using the Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), the grey model (G.M. (1,1)), and Exponential Smoothing (Holt's and Brown's) models. The Food and Agriculture Organization provided the annual statistics on pistachio production in Turkey from 1961 to 2019, which was used in this study. Pistachio production is expected to increase between 2020 and 2030. The mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) statistics were used to assess the performance of the models. The G.M. (1,1) model was found to be significantly better than other models, and it was used to make future predictions. Results showed that the forecasted production value for 2020 was 157.80 thousand tons, rising to 302.86 thousand tons in 2030. Pistachio production is expected to increase during the next ten years.