Using Box-Jenkins Models to Forecast Mobile Cellular Subscription

In this paper, the Box-Jenkins modelling procedure is used to determine an ARIMA model and go further to forecasting. The mobile cellular subscription data for the study were taken from the administrative data submitted to the Zambia Information and Communications Technology Authority (ZICTA) as quarterly returns by all three mobile network operators Airtel Zambia, MTN Zambia and Zamtel. The time series of annual figures for mobile cellular subscription for all mobile network operators is from 2000 to 2014 and has a total of 15 observations. Results show that the ARIMA (1, 2, 1) is an adequate model which best fits the mobile cellular subscription time series and is therefore suitable for forecasting subscription. The model predicts a gradual rise in mobile cellular subscription in the next 5 years, culminating to about 9.0% cumulative increase in 2019.

The Prediction of Propagation Loss of FM Radio Station Using Artificial Neural Network

In order to calculate the propagation loss of electromagnetic waves produced by a transmitter, a variety of models based on empirical and deterministic formulas are used. In this study, one of the artificial neural networks models, Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, which is quite effective for predicting the propagation is used and the results obtained by this algorithm are compared with the simulation results based on ITU-R 1546 and Epstein-Peterson models. In this paper, the propagation loss of FM radio station using artificial neural networks models is studied depending on the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. For training the artificial neural network, as the input data;range (r), effective antenna height (h) and terrain irregularity (△H) parameters are involved and measured values are treated as the output data. The good results obtained in the city area reveal that the artificial neural network is a very efficient method to compute models which integrate theoretical and experimental data. Meanwhile, the results show that an ANN model performs very well compared with theoretical and empiric propagation models with regard to prediction accuracy, complexity, and prediction time. By comparing the results, the RMSE for Neural Network Model using Levenberg-Marquardt is 9.57, and it is lower than that of classical propagation model using Epstein-Peterson for which RMSE is 10.26.

Forecasting Annual International Tourist Arrivals in Zambia Using Holt-Winters Exponential Smoothing

Tourism is one of the major contributors to foreign exchange earnings to Zambia and world economy. Annual International tourist arrivals in Zambia from 1995 to 2014 are considered in this paper. In this study we evaluated the model performance of Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and Holt Winters exponential smoothing (HWES). The error indicators: Mean percentage error (MPE), Mean absolute error (MAE), Mean absolute scaled error (MASE), Root-mean-square error (RMSE) and Mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) showed that HWES is an appropriate model with reasonable forecast accuracy. The HWES (α = 1, β = 0.1246865) showed smallest error than those of the ARIMA (0, 1, 2) models. Hence, the HWES (α = 1, β = 0.1246865) can be used to model annual international tourist arrivals in Zambia. Further, forecasting results give a gradual increase in annual international tourist arrivals of about 42% by 2024. Accurate forecasts are key to new investors and Policymakers. The Zambian government should use such forecasts in formulating policies and making strategies that will promote the tourism industry.