Analysis and Prediction of Suitable Model for Coconut Production Estimates in South Indian States

The study attempts to forecast coconut production in major coconut-producing states in India. The future projections on coconut production have been calculated based on yearly data for 73 years (1949–50 to 2021–22) accessed from the database of Indiastat (2022). We have used prominent forecasting techniques for the purpose and a suitable model has been chosen based on the lowest results of MAPE. The damped linear trend has been chosen for forecasting coconut production in Karnataka whereas Differenced first-order Auto Regressive model with drift has been adopted for Kerala and Karnataka. This study has considered a large dataset compared to other existing works and has chosen states that produce coconut on a large scale in India. Along with this, this study also attempts to find which state will produce more nuts for the Indian coconut industry, which can help the concerned stakeholders to take necessary decisions. Future projections depict that Kerala will continue to be the largest producer of coconut and Karnataka will show remarkable performance in coconut production during the upcoming four years post-study period.