Fuzzy Time Series for Projecting School Enrolment in Malaysia

Abstract

There are a variety of approaches to the problem of predicting educational enrolment.  However, none of them can be used when the historical data are linguistic values.  Fuzzy time series is an efficient and effective tool to deal with such problems. In this paper, the forecast of the enrolment of pre-primary, primary, secondary, and tertiary schools in Malaysia is carried out using fuzzy time series approaches. A fuzzy time series model is developed using historical dataset collected from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) from the year 1981 to 2018.  A complete procedure is proposed which includes: fuzzifying the historical dataset, developing a fuzzy time series model, and calculating and interpreting the outputs. The accuracy of the model are also examined to evaluate how good the developed forecasting model is. It is tested based on the value of the mean squared error (MSE), Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE) and Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD).  The lower the value of error measure, the higher the accuracy of the model.  The result shows that fuzzy time series model developed for primary school enrollments is the most accurate with the lowest error measure, with the MSE value being 0.38, MAPE 0.43 and MAD 0.43 respectively.