Mean-Median Smoothing Backpropagation Neural Network to Forecast Unique Visitors Time Series of Electronic Journal

Sessions or unique visitors is the number of visitors from one IP who accessed a journal portal for the first time in a certain period of time. The large number of unique daily average subscriber visits to electronic journal pages indicates that this scientific periodical is in high demand. Hence, the number of unique visitors is an important indicator of the accomplishment of an electronic journal as a measure of the dissemination in accelerating the journal accreditation system. Numerous methods can be used for forecasting, one of which is the backpropagation neural network (BPNN). Data quality is very important in building a good BPNN model, because the success of modeling at BPNN is very dependent on input data. One way that can be carried out to improve data quality is by smoothing the data. In this study, the forecasting method for predicting time series data for unique visitors to electronic journals employed three models, respectively BPNN, BPNN with mean smoothing, and BPNN with median smoothing. Based on the findings, the results of the smallest error were obtained by the BPNN model with a mean smoothing with MSE 0.00129 and RMSE 0.03518 with a learning rate of 0.4 on 1-2-1 architecture which can be used as a forecast for unique visitors of electronic journals.