Forecasting the prices of field corn in Thailand

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to construct the appropriate forecasting model for the prices of field corn in Thailand using four time series analysis methods, including Box-Jenkins method, Holt’s exponential smoothing method, damped trend exponential smoothing method and combined forecasting method. Time series data from the website of the Office of Agricultural Economics with total 227 months during January, 1997 to November, 2015 are used and divided into two series. The first 216 months from January, 1997 until December, 2014 used to build the forecasting models and the last 11 months from January until November, 2015 used to compare the forecasting methods accuracies via the criteria of the lowest mean absolute percentage error and root mean squared error. Research finding indicated that, combined forecasting model was the most accurate.