1
.
a.
What characteristics define a time series?
b.
Which of the following are examples of time series data?
- The vital statistics of a cancer patient taken right before a major surgery
- The monthly expenses of a small company recorded over a period of five years
- Daily temperature, rainfall, humidity, and wind speeds measured at a particular location over a few months
- Student final grades in all sections of a course at a university
2
.
Consider the graph in the figure as shown below.
a.
Is the trend curve generally increasing, decreasing, or staying level over the entire time period?
b.
The data set USATemps1961-2023.csv contains the time series from which the graph was created. Find the moving average trendline with period 10 for the data.
3
.
a.
What are the characteristics of white noise? Why is it important that the residuals of a time series model be white noise?
b.
Determine which of the following graphs most likely represents white noise.
4
.
Four time series models were produced to model a given dataset. Various measures of error were run on each of the models, the results of which are shown in the table.
MAE | RMSE | MAPE | |
Model 1 | 103.1 | 131.2 | 0.097 |
Model 2 | 251.7 | 207.9 | 0.136 |
Model 3 | 110.7 | 129.0 | 0.115 |
Model 4 | 89.8 | 125.3 | 0.191 |
a.
Identify the most accurate model based only on:
- MAE
- RMSE
- MAPE
b.
Which model is likely to produce the least accurate forecasts overall, and why?
c.
Which model is likely to produce the most accurate forecasts overall, and why?