A Comparison of Seasonal Linear Models and Seasonal ARIMA Models for Forecasting Intra-Day Call Arrivals

In call forecasting literature, both the seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average(ARIMA) type mod-els and seasonal linear models have been popularly suggested as competing models. However, their parallel comparison for the forecasting accuracy was not strictly investigated before. This study evaluates the accuracy of both the seasonal linear models and the seasonal ARIMA-type models when predicting intra-day call arrival rates using both real and simulated data. The seasonal linear models outperform the seasonal ARIMA-type models in both one-day-ahead and one-week-ahead call forecasting in our empirical study