dacruzigor07-tech/mozambique-food-prices

Forecasting staple food prices in Mozambique - BSc dissertation project # Mozambique Food Prices: Forecasting and Early-Warning Dashboard An analytics tool that ingests, cleans, analyses and forecasts staple food prices in Mozambique, presented through an interactive dashboard with an early-warning signal for price spikes. Final-year BSc Computing dissertation project (RES6011, Arden University). ## Motivation Food-price volatility has direct consequences for food security in Mozambique, where households spend a large share of income on food and agriculture supports most of the population. High-quality open price data exists but is difficult for non-specialists to interpret. This project turns that raw data into accessible trends, regional comparisons, forecasts, and an early-warning view of likely price spikes. ## Data sources - **World Food Programme (VAM) Food Prices** — Mozambique staple-price records via the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX). - **World Bank Real-Time Prices (RTP)** — sub-national price and exchange-rate data for validation and enrichment. - **FAO GIEWS** — global price context. All data used is secondary, aggregated, and openly licensed. The project contains no personal or identifiable information. ## Project structure ## Methodology The analytical work follows the CRISP-DM framework (business understanding, data understanding, data preparation, modelling, evaluation, deployment). The software build follows an incremental, Agile-influenced approach. ## Planned components 1. **Data pipeline** — automated ingestion, cleaning, unit and currency normalisation. 2. **Imputation engine** — multiple methods for handling missing market-months, evaluated by measured reconstruction error. 3. **Analysis module** — seasonal decomposition, volatility and shock detection, regional comparison, purchasing-power metric. 4. **Forecasting module** — comparison of SARIMA, Prophet and a gradient-boosting model with time-series backtesting. 5. **Dashboard** — interactive interface surfacing trends, forecasts, and an early-warn …