FORECASTING RICE PRICE IN MALAYSIA

Rice is the main staple food in Malaysia and has been a source of nutrition for most Malaysians. The need to maintain the rice as well as the rice price is essential for all Malaysians since it affects many stakeholders. Policymakers have to ensure the affordability of rice as rice is consumed mostly by Malaysians. The lack of accurate prediction of rice prices that do not involve the factors influence rice prices leads to errors in decision-making by the authorities to take a decision and poor visualization regarding rice prices creates difficulties for policymakers to get an insight into the actual condition. Thus appropriate forecasting should be conducted to provide clear insight. This research utilized the ARIMA model with (8, 2, 0) combination that proved to have about 4,3% MAPE score means that the forecast is almost 96% accurate. Therefore, the development of the forecasting rice price dashboard includes the KPIs to track rice production, consumption, import, and price as the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) inside the dashboard are needed as it help to easier the policymakers to get insight into the current condition and future predictions with influenced factors. This research aims to investigate the factors that influence rice prices in Malaysia, forecast the future value of rice prices, and develop an accurate forecasting rice price dashboard. The results of this research are expected as a tool to help the decision makers of rice prices in making decisions and policies on Malaysia's national rice price.