Prospects of livestock and dairy production in India under time series framework.

Abstract

In spite of continuous decline in contribution of agriculture in total gross domestic product (GDP), share of livestock sector especially dairy production in total GDP has shown a continuous rise trend over the last 30 years. Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) approach has been applied for modeling and forecasting of milk production of India. Autocorrelation (AC) and partial autocorrelation (PAC) functions were estimated, which led to the identification and construction of ARIMA models, suitable in explaining the time series and forecasting the future production. A significant increasing linear trend in the total milk production in India has been found. To this end, evaluation of forecasting is carried out with mean absolute prediction error (MAPE), relative mean absolute prediction error (RMAPE) and root mean square error (RMSE). The best identified model for the data under consideration was used for out-of-sample forecasting up to the year 2015.