Trend Analysis

Synonyms

Trend evaluation; Trend studies

Definition

Trend analysis is, fundamentally, a method for understanding how and why things have changed – or will change – over time. One issue to be aware of when attempting to understand trend analysis is the wide variety of disciplinary contexts within which it is discussed. This makes it more difficult to define in a universal sense, but for the purposes of clarity, it can be defined here as an approach to analysis which collates data and then attempts to discover patterns, or trends, within that data for the purposes of understanding or predicting behaviors. This typically involves the elimination of “noise” or error in a time-series dataset. Thus, this encyclopedia entry is about statistical trend analysis.

Description

Given the definition for trend analysis provided here, and alternative definitions in existence, it is useful to first give a contextualized example. For this purpose, imagine a time-series dataset for a particular area,...