Space and time related data generated is becoming ever more voluminous, noisy and heterogeneous outpacing the research efforts in the domain of climate. Nevertheless, this data portrays recent climate/ weather change patterns. Thus, insightful approaches are required to overcome the challenges when handling the so called “big data” to unravel the recent unprecedented climate change in particular, its variability, frequency and effects on key crops. Contemporary climate-crop models developed at least two decades ago are found to be unsuitable for analysing complex climate/weather data retrospectively. In this context, the chapter looks at the use of scalable time series analysis, namely ARIMA (Autoregressive integrated moving average) models and data mining techniques to extract new knowledge on the climate change effects on Malaysia's oil palm yield at the regional and administrative divisional scales. The results reveal recent trends and patterns in climate change and its effects on oil palm yield impossible otherwise e.g. Traditional statistical methods alone.
Modelling the climate change effects on Malaysia's oil palm yield