In this paper – A Comparison of Forecasting Methods for Frequency of Rainfall in Umuahia, Abia State, Nigeria – statistical analysis of two different forecasting techniques, Box Jenkins SARIMA and Holt-Winters Exponential Smoothing, using the data collected from the National Root Crop Research Institute, Umudike (2007-2016) was carried out with a view to determining a better forecasting method. This was achieved using four forecast error statistics–ME, MASE, MAE and RSME. Although SARIMA method has the minimum error values, a paired – sample t-test shows that there is no significant difference between the forecast values obtained from the two forecasting methods. This therefore presupposes that the Holt-Winters is equally a good forecasting method for the frequency of Rainfall in Nigeria.
Keywords: Box-Jenkins SARIMA, Forecast Error Statistics., Frequency of Rainfall, Holt-Winters Exponential Smoothing
