Forecasting Monthly Swedish Air Traveler Volumes

Abstract: In this paper we conduct an out-of-sample forecasting exercise for monthly Swedish air traveler volumes. The models considered are multiplicative seasonal ARIMA, Neural network autoregression, Exponential smoothing, the Prophet model and a Random Walk as a benchmark model. We divide the out-of-sample data into three different evaluation periods: Pre-COVID-19, during COVID-19 and Post-COVID-19 for which we calculate the MAE, MAPE and RMSE for each model in each of these evaluation periods. The results show that for the Pre-COVID-19 period all models produce accurate forecasts, in comparison to the Random Walk model. For the period during COVID-19, no model outperforms the Random Walk, with only Exponential smoothing performing as well as the Random Walk. For the period Post-COVID-19, the best performing models are Random Walk, SARIMA and Exponential smoothing, with all aforementioned models having similar performance.