Statistical Analysis of Religious Population in Asian Countries

Abstract

Asian history and culture have been influenced by a number of religions i.e. Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Christianism, Sikhism, Shamanism, etc. These traditions offer spiritual guidelines but also set moral and ethical standards for the daily life of the people in Asian countries. The main purpose of this study is to find out, how Asian religious population is changing over time? Religious population data for different census years have been collected from the website of Asian countries. As population varies over time, religious population data is time series data. There are mainly four types of variations observed in time series data namely seasonal variation, cyclical variation, trend and irregular or random variation. Time series analysis and analysis of variance have been applied for analyzing the data. It is observed that percentages of some religious groups are decreasing and for some religious group are increasing gradually. Also the percentages of some religious groups become stagnant in the sense that no significant change.