Time Series

Abstract

There are many series of data which are followed with great interest by business analysts, stockbrokers, politicians and even sports fans. You must have heared of some of them: On the Stock Market there is daily reporting of the share-price index. For the cost of living there is the once-a-month reporting of the latest Retail Price Index. The weather and football results provide a stream of daily, weekly and seasonal figures to chew over. But all too often there is a great deal of over-reaction to the latest figures. People fail to put the numbers in a historical context and ask, ‘Is this value really different, or is it just a freak?’ This chapter will show you ways of exploring time series data with the aid of your microcomputer. This chapter differs from all the previous chapters in one major respect -I will not be asking you to make use of your house price data set. The reason for this is practical-to get a reasonable time series of data on house prices would require a couple of years, and I am sure you don’t want to wait that long before starting on this chapter! So the data here will be examples taken from published data sources.