Modeling the Nigerian Bonny Light Crude Oil Price: The Power of Fuzzy Time Series

Several authors have used different classical statistical models to fit the Nigerian Bonny Light crude oil price but the application of machine learning models and Fuzzy Time Series model on the crude oil price has been grossly understudied. Therefore, in this study, a classical statistical model—Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), two machine learning models—Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Random Forest (RF) and Fuzzy Time Series (FTS) Model were compared in modeling the Nigerian Bonny Light crude oil price data for the periods from January, 2006 to December, 2020. The monthly secondary data were collected from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and Reuters website and divided into train (70%) and test (30%) sets. The train set was used in building the models and the models were validated using the test set. The performance measures used for the comparison include: The modified Diebold-Mariano test, the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) values. Based on the performance measures, ANN (4, 1, 1) and RF performed better than ARIMA (1, 1, 0) model but FTS model using Chen’s algorithm outperformed every other model. The results recommend the use of FTS model for forecasting future values of the Nigerian Bonny Light Crude oil. However, a hybrid model of ARIMA-ANN or ARIMA-RF should be built and compared with Chen’s algorithm FTS model for the same data set to further verify the power of FTS model using Chen’s algorithm.

A Cox Proportional Hazard Model Approach to Age at First Sexual Intercourse in Nigeria

Early age at first sexual intercourse comes with many negative sexual outcomes namely: having unprotected sex on first sexual intercourse, condom misuse, high rate of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), teenage pregnancy, increased number of sexual partners, etc. In this paper, we considered some socio-demographic and cultural factors and their relationship with age at first sexual intercourse so as to reduce the numerous negative sexual outcomes of early age at first sexual intercourse using the 2018 Nigerian Demographic and Health Survey data. The analysis was made using the Cox proportional hazard model and the Kaplan-Meier plot. The result shows that some respondents started having their first sexual intercourse at the age of 8 years and about 54.4% of the respondents had their first sexual intercourse before age 17 years. The median age of first sexual intercourse is 16 years which implies that about 50% of the respondents had their first sexual intercourse on or before their 16th birthday. Education, religion, region and residence significantly affects the age of first sexual intercourse while circumcision has no significant effect.