A new forecasting method for cereal consumption: Combined method of LASSO and semi-parametric regression

There is a diversified range of food available while cereal is the main food of Chinese residents. The most important food pattern of Chinese residents is that cereal is the staple food. While many people have misunderstandings about the nutrition of cereal food, the consumption of cereal is decreasing year by year. In order to ensure the dietary balance of Chinese residents, the influence factors of cereal consumption are valuable to research. Because of the high number of impact factors, we first use the LASSO method to select the main influence factors of cereal consumption, and then we construct a partially linear semi-parametric model for predicting the cereal consumption of Chinese residents. The results show that the factors affecting per capita consumption of rice, wheat and maize are different from one another and the three cereals have both common impact factors and differentiated ones; Per Capita Disposable Income (PCDI) is the common factor with a linear positive relationship to the consumption of the three cereals; the model constructed in this paper is well fitted and can accurately forecast the consumption of cereals; the average per capita consumption of rice, wheat and maize is predicted to be 78.56 kg/year, 62.73kg/year and 6.64 kg/year respectively by 2025, which is excessive and is caused by irrational dietary structure, food wastage and processing losses.