Predictive Model for Monthly Made Tea Production in Sri Lanka

Abstract

This study forecasts monthly tea production in Sri Lanka by developing a suitable time series model to identify future trends in the national tea industry. The analysis is based on monthly made tea production data from January 2000 to June 2025, obtained from the Central Bank of Sri Lanka and the Sri Lanka Tea Board. After confirming the non-stationarity of the original series through the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test, both first-order and seasonal differencing were applied to achieve stationarity. The Autocorrelation Function (ACF) and Partial Autocorrelation Function (PACF) plotswere used to identify potential model structures.