Time series smoothing, avoiding revisions

Question

This time my question is more methodological than technical. I have weekly time series data which gets updated every week. Unfortunately the time series is quite volatile. I would thus like to apply a filter/a smoothing method. I tried Hodrick-Prescott and LOESS. Both results look fine, with the downturn that if a new datapoint follows which diverges strongly from the historic data points, the older values have to be revised/are changing. Does somebody know a method which is implemented in R, which could do what I want? A name of a method/a function would probably be completely sufficient. It should however be something more sophisticated than a left sided moving average, because I would not like to lose data at the beginning of the time series. Every helping comment is appreciated! Thank you very much!

Best regards,

Andreas

Answer 1

I think (?) that the term you may be looking for is causal filtering, i.e. filtering that doesn't depend on future values. Within this category probably the simplest/best known approach is exponential smoothing, which is implemented in the forecast and expsmooth packages (library("sos"); findFn("{exponential smoothing}")).

Does that help?

Answer 2

It seems you need a robust two-sided smoother. The problem is that an outlier at an end-point is indistinguishable from a sudden change in the trend. It only becomes clear that it is an outlier after several more observations are collected (and even then some strong assumptions of trend smoothness are required).

I think you will find it hard to do better than loess(), but other functions that aim to do robust smoothing include

• smooth() for Tukey's smoothers;
• supsmu() for Friedman's super smoother;

Hodrick-Prescott smoothing is not robust to outliers.