Forecasting and Technical Comparison of Inflation in Turkey With Box-Jenkins (ARIMA) Models and the Artificial Neural Network

Abstract

Inflation refers to an ongoing and overall comprehensive increase in the overall level of goods and services price in the economy. Today, inflation, which is attempted to be kept under control by central banks or, in the same way, whose price stability is attempted, consists of continuous price changes that occur in all the goods and services used by the consumers. Undoubtedly, in terms of economy, in addition to the realized inflation, inflation expectations are also gaining importance. This situation requires forecasting the future rates of inflation. Therefore, reliable forecasting of the future rates of inflation in a country will determine the policies to be applied by the decision-makers in the economy. The aim of this study is to predict inflation in the next period based on the consumer price index (CPI) data with two alternative techniques and to examine the predictive performance of these two techniques comparatively. Thus, the first of the two main objectives of the study are to forecast the future rates of inflation with two alternative techniques, while the second is to compare the two techniques with respect to statistical and econometric criteria and determine which technique performs better in comparison. In this context, the 9-month inflation in April-December 2019 was forecast by Box-Jenkins (ARIMA) models and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), using the CPI data which consist of 207 data from January 2002 to March 2019 and the predictive performance of both techniques was examined comparatively. It was observed that the results obtained from both techniques were close to each other.