Modeling of water consumption in Saudi Arabia using classical and modern time series methods

Overpopulation, industrialization, urbanization, and the spreading out of irrigated agricultural lands are the driving forces to increase the demand of water in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Improvement, production, and management of various commodities are one of the objectives of vision 2030 of the Kingdom. In this paper, we seek to find the paramount model for water consumption in Saudi Arabia using classical and modern tools of time series analysis. From the classical time series analysis, we employed multiplicative seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) model, while functional autoregressive (FAR) model was adopted under modern time series analysis. A data of water consumption from January 2001 to December 2016 were analyzed, and the results were compared using these two methods. This study is the first ever application of FAR method in Saudi Arabia using water consumption data. Statistical analysis exhibits that the best model for water consumption data under classical approach is SARIMA (1,0,2)(2,1,1) [12] while FAR (1) under modern paradigm. A comparison between these methods reveals that FAR modeling is better than SARIMA in training as well as in forecasting of water consumption data in the Kingdom. This kind of modeling is beneficial for future policy implications.