Forecasting models for economic factors affecting banana cultivation in Kerala

An attempt was made to construct prediction models for the area, production and price of Banana in Kerala using ARIMA (Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average) model. The yearly secondary data on area, production and price of Banana collected from the Directorate of Economics and Statistics for the period from 1952-53 to 2018-19 were used for the analysis. The main objective of the study included assessment of trend and growth rates of area, production and price and identification of the best ARIMA model for prediction. Excellent parsimonious forecasting equations could be generated using the ARIMA technique. The validity of the models was tested using standard statistical techniques. The forecasting power of ARIMA model was used to forecast for six leading years, and results showed a good agreement between actual and predicted values.