Forecasting stochastic consumer portability visitation pattern in fair price shops of India

In India, the Public Distribution System (PDS) is a critical tool for accomplishing the aim of “Zero Hunger”. Despite the enormous resources used, PDS has several inefficiencies that are caused by the monopoly of agents engaged in last-mile grain supply. Various state governments in India have been employing portability as an innovative solution to address this problem. In this article, we examined a huge-scale data on the deployment of portable beneficiaries arriving in a particular FPS of Kerala state in India over three years. A comparison is made between Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) method which makes forecasts in univariate data and ARIMA with exogenous variables called ARIMAX. We followed Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) as the accuracy performance measure of the models and observed that the ARIMAX model outperforms the ARIMA model with the least forecasting errors.