Autoregressive models in environmental forecasting time series: a theoretical and application review

Though globalization, industrialization, and urbanization have escalated the economic growth of nations, these activities have played foul on the environment. Better understanding of ill effects of these activities on environment and human health and taking appropriate control measures in advance are the need of the hour. Time series analysis can be a great tool in this direction. ARIMA model is the most popular accepted time series model. It has numerous applications in various domains due its high mathematical precision, flexible nature, and greater reliable results. ARIMA and environment are highly correlated. Though there are many research papers on application of ARIMA in various fields including environment, there is no substantial work that reviews the building stages of ARIMA. In this regard, the present work attempts to present three different stages through which ARIMA was evolved. More than 100 papers are reviewed in this study to discuss the application part based on pure ARIMA and its hybrid modeling with special focus in the field of environment/health/air quality. Forecasting in this field can be a great contributor to governments and public at large in taking all the required precautionary steps in advance. After such a massive review of ARIMA and hybrid modeling involving ARIMA in the fields including or excluding environment/health/atmosphere, it can be concluded that the combined models are more robust and have higher ability to capture all the patterns of the series uniformly. Thus, combining several models or using hybrid model has emerged as a routinized custom.