Modeling emigration of Fiji´s population using Artificial Neural Network

Because emigration plays a major role in the national demographic structure, it is vital that some model be identified to forecast population by identifying prevailing emigration trends, apart from other contributing factors. The choice of which model to use depends on which ones incur minimal errors in the forecasting process. This paper proposes an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model for forecasting emigration for Fiji population components during the years from 1986 to 2012. The proposed ANN model is also computed with the Naive Method as the benchmark method for modeling emigration of Fiji´s population. The performances of the two models used are based on the values of the various error functions used such as the Root Square Mean Error (RSME), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE).