Seasonality

Spring’s green shades were a tonic saturating the dishes served at the Azizam pop-up dinner on Monday night, held in the space recently vacated by Konbi in Echo Park.The meal began with sabzi khordan, a platter full of basil and other bunches of herbs with walnuts, radishes and a small rectangle of feta; deputy Food editor Betty Hallock and I snacked on them alongside freshly shelled fava beans and crusty barbari still warm from the oven.Two triangles of baked kuku sabzi, one of my favorite Persian egg dishes, popped…

Did the U.S. add half a million jobs in January or did it lose 2.5 million? The government said both happened—but investors and policy makers cared about the seasonally adjusted increase of 517,000.The three-million difference shows how views on the economy are shaped by federal agencies accounting for normal yearly patterns due to factors such as the temperature, holidays, school dates and travel schedules. Throughout the year, consumers and firms alter their behavior, buying coats in the winter and hot dogs…

As we head into another seasonal period, it’s time to prepare our holiday strategies to maximize client visibility for the deal-getters and the peak shoppsouing period. During the next quarter, many of us acknowledge that we’re likely to see a change in traffic levels as we attribute this to seasonality.  This does not affect all business models. Still, for some (outside of the ecommerce spectrum), interest begins to slow down as consumer focuses are laid elsewhere, and company…

An intuition of how seasonality affects time series analysisPhoto by Jake Hills on UnsplashSeasonality is a crucial aspect of time-series analysis. As time-series are indexed forward in time, they are subject to seasonal fluctuations. For example, we expect ice cream sales to be higher in the summer months and lower in the winter months.Seasonality can come in different time intervals such as days, weeks or months. The key for time-series analysis is to understand how the seasonality affects our series, therefore making…

A Fourier transform analysis using RPhoto by Photoholgic on UnsplashGovernment revenues and expenditures, traveler flows, and export and import values are time series related to economic phenomena. By their nature, they are subject to trends, breaks in structure, and other elements. These factors can generate false conclusions when trying to find the seasonality that best characterizes such time series. In the following paragraphs, we will analyze a case that, at first, may bring some frustration but, in the end, is an…