Forecasting Turkey's Hazelnut Export Quantities with Facebook's Prophet Algorithm and Box-Cox Transformation

Time series forecasting methods are used by an evolving field of data analytics for the prediction of market trends, sales, and demands. Turkey is the major producer of hazelnut in the world. If Turkey wants to continue its domination of hazelnut and protect the price-setting role, time series forecasting methods could be key factors accordingly. There are a few studies that focused on time series forecasting of hazelnut export quantities of Turkey, and this study uses a recently developed algorithm and implements a power transformation to increase the forecast accuracy. The presented research aims to forecast Turkey’s hazelnut export quantities for the coming 36-months starting from June 2020. The forecasting process was conducted with the help of Facebook’s Prophet algorithm. To improve the forecast accuracy, a Box-Cox power transformation was also implemented to process. To find out the stationarity and periodicity of the data set, the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test and autocorrelation function was applied to the time-series data. The Prophet algorithm, with Box-Cox transformation, projected the hazelnut export quantity could be over five hundred thousand tons from 07/2020 to 06/2023. The export quantities were in an increment trend, and the slope of the trend has increased since June 2008 by 0.66 % per month. The Prophet algorithm also revealed the seasonality of the data set, and the export amounts indicate monthly oscillations. The monthly export volumes start to increase and reach their peak value in October because August is the time for the harvest of hazelnuts in Turkey.