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I disagree. That link shows no formulas whatsoever, just a generalized explanation of what they do. Without a hard set of rules to follow, it's useless. Also

I disagree. That link shows no formulas whatsoever, just a generalized explanation of what they do. Without a hard set of rules to follow, it's useless. Also, looking into the X-13 ARIMA software documentation, it looks similar to other statistical software packages like Eviews, which I have used in the past. This methodology they follow still highly subjective based on the parameters used in the model. This is very much like what my employer does for publishing public documents for financial compliance. We are required to publish a public methodology/rulebook for our products so that investors can, in theory, replicate everything we are doing on our side. In practice, though, forget it. No one can replicate it. The document serves to explain the concepts behind the product and the general guidelines, but no one can fully know the granular details that make all the difference. It sounds like the same thing is going on here. No one can realistically be expected to take the same gigantic set of data, individually set a dozen or more parameters and run it through software and get the same result. And that's not even counting data sets that the "clean" by discarding certain outliers before running the model.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> I disagree. That link shows no formulas whatsoever, just a generalized explanation of what they do. I said the link was a general overview of seasonal adjustment used in data series by the BLS, and that they provide additional detail the about the specific methodology used in specific series elsewhere. But the key part from that summary relevant to your comment upthread is that not only are the specific methodologies for particular series published in advance, but the resulting adjustment factors for future time periods are determined and published in advance, before the data to be adjusted exists. One may disagree with the methodology or the figures, but neither is the methodology opaque nor are the factors chosen to get desired results (since the actual raw data, and thus the factors necessary to get produce desired results, are not available.)

dragonwriter 10y ago

> I disagree. That link shows no formulas whatsoever, just a generalized explanation of what they do. I said the link was a general overview of seasonal adjustment used in data series by the BLS, and that they provide additional detail the about the specific methodology used in specific series elsewhere. But the key part from that summary relevant to your comment upthread is that not only are the specific methodologies for particular series published in advance, but the resulting adjustment factors for future time periods are determined and published in advance, before the data to be adjusted exists. One may disagree with the methodology or the figures, but neither is the methodology opaque nor are the factors chosen to get desired results (since the actual raw data, and thus the factors necessary to get produce desired results, are not available.)