Handling forecasting problems using fuzzy time series

In [6-9], Song et al. proposed fuzzy time-series models to deal with forecasting problems. In [10], Sullivan and Woodall reviewed the first-order time-invariant fuzzy time series model and the first-order time-variant model proposed by Song and Chissom [6-8], where the models are compared with each other and with a time-invariant Markov model using linguistic labels with probability distributions. In this paper, we propose a new method to forecast university enrollments, where the historical enrollments of the University of Alabama shown in [7,8] are used to illustrate the forecasting process. The average forecasting errors and the time complexity of these methods are compared. The proposed method is more efficient than the ones presented in [7,8,10] due to the fact that the proposed method simplifies the arithmetic operation process. Furthermore, the average forecasting error of the proposed method is smaller than the ones presented in [2,7,8]. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.