COMPARING FORECASTS OF AGRICULTURAL SECTOR EXPORT VALUES USING SARIMA AND LONG SHORT-TERM MEMORY MODELS

Abstract

Indonesia's agricultural sector plays a crucial role in the national economy, with significant export potential and supporting the livelihoods of the majority of the population. As part of the government's vision to make Indonesia the world's food barn by 2045, increasing the volume and value of agricultural product exports is a primary focus, making export value forecasting essential for supporting strategic decision-making. Sequential data analysis is an important approach in analyzing data collected over a specific period. This study aims to compare two popular methods in forecasting the export value of the agricultural sector, namely the Seasonal AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) model and the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model. Monthly agricultural export data from West Java Province from January 2013 to February 2024 were used as the dataset. The best SARIMA model generated was (1,1,1)(0,1,1)12, while the optimal parameters for the LSTM model were neuron: 50, dropout rate: 0.3, number of layers: 2, activation function: relu, epochs: 500, batch size: 64, optimizer: Adam, and learning rate: 0.01. Evaluation was performed using the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) method to measure the accuracy of both models in forecasting the export value of the agricultural sector. The results showed that the LSTM model outperformed the SARIMA model, with a lower RMSE value (SARIMA: 4182.133 and LSTM: 1939.02). This research provides valuable insights for decision-makers in planning agricultural sector export strategies in the future. With this comparison, it is expected to provide better guidance in selecting forecasting methods suitable for the characteristics of the data.