Abstract:
Green chilli is one of the most important cash crops grown in Sri Lanka. Also, it has become an
essential ingredient in Sri Lankan meals. Observing the fluctuation of Green chilli production is
essential in the market economy. The level of the production and its’ fluctuation not only has a
significant influence on farmers’ income and consumer price, but a reasonable and stable
production also has an irreplaceable effect on the safe running of the chilli market. The green
chilli production is made under two seasons, Yala and Maha. In this research, the annual
production of green chilli in Jaffna was modeled by using Autoregressive Integrated Moving
Average (ARIMA) approach. The data were obtained from the Department of Census and
Statistics, during the period of 2002 to 2018. The Box-Jenkin’s procedure was used to build the
ARIMA model for the annual chilli production. Further, Akaike Information Criterion (AIC),
Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) and Mean Squared Error (MSE) were used to select the
best model among some possible models. Through modeling, it was identified that ARIMA
(1,1,0) is the best fitting model for the given data. Moreover, the adequacy of the best model was
examined using L’jung-box test. Finally, the identified best model was used for short term
prediction.
