This post was written by Dirk Eddelbuettel and Christoph Sax and will be posted on both author’s respective blogs.
The seasonal package by Christoph Sax brings a very featureful and expressive interface for working with seasonal data to the R environment. It uses the standard tool of the trade: X-13ARIMA-SEATS. This powerful program is provided by the statisticians of the US Census Bureau based on their earlier work (named X-11 and X-12-ARIMA) as well as the TRAMO/SEATS program by the Bank of Spain. X-13ARIMA-SEATS is probably the best known tool for de-seasonalization of timeseries, and used by statistical offices around the world.
Sadly, it also has a steep learning curve. One interacts with a basic command-line tool which users have to download, install and properly reference (by environment variables or related means). Each model specification has to be prepared in a special ‘spec’ file that uses its own, cumbersome syntax.
As seasonal provides all the required functionality to use X-13ARIMA-SEATS from R — see the very nice seasonal demo site — it still required the user to manually deal with the X-13ARIMA-SEATS installation.
So we decided to do something about this. A pair of GitHub repositories provide both the underlying binary in a per-operating system form (see x13prebuilt) as well as a ready-to- use R package (see x13binary) which uses the former to provide binaries for R. And the latter is now on CRAN as package x13binary ready to be used on Windows, OS-X or Linux. And the seasonal package (in version 1.2.0 — now on CRAN — or later) automatically makes use of it. Installing seasaonal and x13binary in R is now as easy as:
install.packages("seasonal")which opens the door for effortless deployment of powerful deasonalization. By default, the principal function of the package employs a number of automated techniques that work well in most …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com