Forecast of Chinese pet population and Global Pet Food Demand Based on RF-MLR-ARIMA and GB-XGBoost

With the global economic development, the acceleration of urbanization and the wide popularization of the "pet companionship" concept, the pet industry has grown from a traditional niche field into an emerging economic sector with both market potential and development challenges. Accurately analyzing the trends of core industry indicators has become a key prerequisite for supporting the sustainable development of the industry and the strategic decision-making of enterprises. This paper constructs a comprehensive prediction model of random forest - multiple linear regression - ARIMA, and concludes that the number of pet cats in China will continue to increase in the next three years, while the number of pet dogs will tend to stabilize. After the dimensionality reduction of the indicators, the gradient boosting regression - XGBoost model was adopted for analysis. The results show that the United States dominates the global demand for pet food, while the Chinese market demonstrates strong growth. This research can provide strong academic support for the trend analysis of the pet industry and the formulation of sustainable development strategies.