News Popularity Prediction in West Sumatera Using Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average

Abstract

The increasing public interest in reading online news is undoubtedly a challenge for news portals as online news providers. Therefore, this research was conducted to predict news popularity in West Sumatra through the FajarSumbar.com news portal using the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model. This research aims to develop a forecasting model that can assist in estimating the popularity of each news category so that news portals can devise more effective content strategies. The data used in this study includes the number of monthly news impressions from March 2021 to June 2024, which are grouped into various categories such as Religion & Culture, Industrial Economics, Criminal Law, etc. Using the ARIMA method, which can handle time series data and overcome data non-stationarity problems through differencing and the use of grid search in optimization to find the best parameters based on the lowest evaluation metric. The results show that the ARIMA model can provide reasonably accurate predictions, although the level of accuracy varies between categories. The Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) values obtained are as follows: Religion & Culture 26%, Industrial Economy 29%, Criminal Law 29%, Health 40%, Sports 38%, Tourism & Entertainment 26%, Education 27%, Government Politics 31%, Social Environment 27%, and Technology 51%. The Technology and Health news categories show higher error rates than others, while Religion & Culture and Tourism & Entertainment have better accuracy rates. Thus, the ARIMA model can be used to predict future trends in news popularity, helping editors plan content strategies that are more relevant and interesting to readers. However, improvements are needed for news categories that have high variability.