Comparison Between SARIMA and DeepAR with Optuna Hyperparameter Optimization for Estimating Rice Production Data in Indonesia

Forecast is a prediction of future events that had taken a significant role in our society especially when facing time-sensitive issues like food availability. Food is a critical aspect in ensuring people's welfare, especially in a country like Indonesia with a large population. Availability and access to rice are a vital need for the people of Indonesia. Rice is not only the main source of carbohydrates, but also has a central role in the cultural and social aspects of Indonesian society. Forecasting can be a strategy to anticipate fluctuations in food demand and supply. Forecasting can be an important instrument for the government and stakeholders to make the right and effective decisions. The growing period of rice which is heavily influenced by seasonality makes DeepAR and SARIMA techniques a good solution to solve this problem. Both methods offer the ability to address features in rice production such as trends, seasonality, and anomaly effects. This study demonstrates that DeepAR, especially when optimized with Optuna, outperforms SARIMA in forecasting rice production in Indonesia, as evidenced by superior performance in key evaluation metrics such as Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE).