1.1 Overview of Time Series Characteristics

In this lesson, we’ll describe some important features that we must consider when describing and modeling a time series. This is meant to be an introductory overview, illustrated by example, and not a complete look at how we model a univariate time series. Here, we’ll only consider univariate time series. We’ll examine relationships between two or more time series later on.

One difference from standard linear regression is that the data are not necessarily independent and not necessarily identically distributed. One defining characteristic of a time series is that it is a list of observations where the ordering matters. Ordering is very important because there is dependency and changing the order could change the meaning of the data.

The following plot is a time series plot of the annual number of earthquakes in the world with seismic magnitude over 7.0, for 99 consecutive years. By a time series plot, we simply mean that the variable is plotted against time.

One of the simplest ARIMA type models is a model in which we use a linear model to predict the value at the present time using the value at the previous time. This is called an AR(1) model, standing for autoregressive model of order 1. The order of the model indicates how many previous times we use to predict the present time.

Leave a Comment