Daengku: Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Innovation
Vol. 6 No. 2 (2026)

A Hybrid Soft Computing Approach to Inflation Forecasting: HybridSutte Versus Exponential Smoothing Benchmarks in an Emerging Economy

Ansari Saleh Ahmar (Department of Statistics, Universitas Negeri Makassar, Makassar, 90223, Indonesia)
Abdul Rahman (Department of Mathematics, Universitas Negeri Makassar, Makassar, 90223, Indonesia)



Article Info

Publish Date
30 Apr 2026

Abstract

Central banks in commodity-dependent emerging economies face a structural forecasting challenge: exponential smoothing methods calibrated on supply-shock training windows systematically overproject the downward trend into post-shock stabilisation phases, producing compounding errors that undermine monetary policy communication. This paper proposes HybridSutte, a soft computing model that fuses four-point alpha-Sutte recurrence with exponential smoothing correction, as an alternative to conventional exponential smoothing benchmarks. Monthly year-on-year Consumer Price Index data published by Bank Indonesia cover January 2021 through December 2025 (n = 60 observations), capturing Indonesia's complete monetary policy cycle: COVID-19 demand recovery, Russia-Ukraine commodity supply shock (peak: 5.95%, September 2022), Bank Indonesia's 250 basis-point rate-hike disinflation campaign, and the subsequent 2025 post-shock stabilisation within the 2.5% ± 1% target band. The 51/9 in-sample/out-of-sample partition places the evaluation window (April–December 2025) entirely within the structurally distinct post-shock stabilised regime. HybridSutte achieves out-of-sample RMSE of 0.606% and MAPE of 21.25%, compared with Holt's double exponential smoothing (ETS) RMSE of 3.069% and MAPE of 121.60%, yielding reductions of 80.2% and 82.5%, respectively. The performance advantage grows monotonically with forecast horizon h, reaching a 451.1% cumulative absolute error differential by  = 9. This is the first application of HybridSutte to central bank inflation data in an emerging market and the first to evaluate a soft computing hybrid model across a complete five-year monetary policy cycle. Findings support regime-aware model selection for central bank forecasting departments.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

daengku

Publisher

Subject

Humanities Education Languange, Linguistic, Communication & Media Law, Crime, Criminology & Criminal Justice Other

Description

The Daengku seeks to publish high-quality research papers, review articles, and book reviews that make a contribution to knowledge through the application and development of theories, new data exploration, and/or scientific analysis of salient policy issues. The Scope of the Daengku includes the ...