A MIXED FUZZY EXPERT SYSTEM AND REGRESSION MODEL FOR FORECASTING THE VOLUME OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE CONTAINERS

The forecast of volumes of import/export containers is one of the most important issues for government, transportation departments and seaport organizations. the past, although a number of studies focus on the subject of forecast of import/export, containers, most studies have not considered the forecast error due to the "non-stationary" relationship between the volumes of import/export containers and the economic variables. Thus this article attempts to fill this gap in the current literature by establishing a mixed fuzzy expert system and regression model. An empirical study in Taiwan is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mixed fuzzy expert system and regression model. Finally, this paper compares the accuracy of this proposed mixed fuzzy expert system and regression model, the traditional linear regression model, and the traditional non-linear regression model for forecasting the volumes of Taiwan's import, containers. The comparison results show that the proposed mixed fuzzy expert system and regression model exhibits higher prediction accuracy than, previous models.