Moreover, its accuracy might be jeopardized from overfitting because of the limited number of
available training cases. Another important issue is that it is quite difficult for practitioners to utilize
and interpret an ANN model. On the other hand, the great advantage of using the ARIMA model is
that it only needs the information regarding one variable to build a model. However, it will take time
to choose the optimal coefficients, especially if the statistical package used lacks the capability of
searching for the right coefficient. For MLR, although its accuracy is the lowest among all proposed
methods, the algorithm is the simplest one. Additionally, it uses less calculation time to generate the
regression model than the other two methods. As a result, users need to evaluate the trade-off between
forecasting accuracy and limitation of the method before switching from traditional methods to ANN.
This is an interesting issue since the important aspect of the forecasting is the principle of parsimony.
If all models are equal, simple models will be preferred to complex models. For this reason, both
ARIMA and MLR might be preferred to the ANN model since the structure of both methods is simpler
than the one of ANN.