A tree based eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) machine learning model to forecast the annual rice production in Bangladesh

by Mst Noorunnahar, Arman Hossain Chowdhury, Farhana Arefeen Mila

In this study, we attempt to anticipate annual rice production in Bangladesh (1961–2020) using both the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) methods and compare their respective performances. On the basis of the lowest Corrected Akaike Information Criteria (AICc) values, a significant ARIMA (0, 1, 1) model with drift was chosen based on the findings. The drift parameter value shows that the production of rice positively trends upward. Thus, the ARIMA (0, 1, 1) model with drift was found to be significant. On the other hand, the XGBoost model for time series data was developed by changing the tunning parameters frequently with the greatest result. The four prominent error measures, such as mean absolute error (MAE), mean percentage error (MPE), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), were used to assess the predictive performance of each model. We found that the error measures of the XGBoost model in the test set were comparatively lower than those of the ARIMA model. Comparatively, the MAPE value of the test set of the XGBoost model (5.38%) was lower than that of the ARIMA model (7.23%), indicating that XGBoost performs better than ARIMA at predicting the annual rice production in Bangladesh. Hence, the XGBoost model performs better than the ARIMA model in predicting the annual rice production in Bangladesh. Therefore, based on the better performance, the study forecasted the annual rice production for the next 10 years using the XGBoost model. According to our predictions, the annual rice production in Bangladesh will vary from 57,850,318 tons in 2021 to 82,256,944 tons in 2030. The forecast indicated that the amount of rice produced annually in Bangladesh will increase in the years to come.