Time Series Modeling of Guinea Fowls Production in Kenya Using the ARIMA and ARFIMA Models

Abstract

Commercial farming of Guinea Fowls is at its infant stages and is generating a lot of interest for farmers in Kenya. This, coupled with an increased demand for poultry products in the Kenyan market in the recent past, calls for the rearing of the guinea fowls which are birds reared for meat and partly for eggs. In order to have an efficient production of poultry products for this type of poultry farming, there is need for an efficient modeling using sound statistical methodologies. It's in this regard that the study modeled Guinea Fowl production in Kenya using the Univariate Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and the Auto-Regressive Fractional Integrated Moving Average (ARFIMA) models. Yearly guinea fowl production data for the period of 2010 to 2019 obtained from Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO-Kenya) was used in the study in which the Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF) test was used to check for stationarity while the Hurst Exponent was used to test the long-memory property of the series. The ARIMA and ARFIMA models gave a better fit to the data and were used to forecast Guinea Fowl Weights. Fitted model forecast were evaluated via the Random Mean Squared Error (RMSE) in which the ARFIMA model was found to give a better forecast of the Guinea Fowl weights compared to the ARIMA model.