Question
You are looking for a certain indicator with given units, adjustment, and frequency, and it doesn't exist as a native time series; what alternatives should you check?
Answer
The Data Buffet catalog does not contain every time series you might want; for brevity, we usually carry only the fundamental measure (level at highest available frequency). You can then modify or mix-and-match to suit your needs.
We recommend this exploratory strategy:
- Is the series reported by a source, and do we republish it natively?
- Did we create a supplemental series as a convenience?
- Can you perform a simple change to a single series using our inbuilt tools?
- Convert the frequency
- Apply a common analytic transformation (simple or Y/Y, difference or percent change, annualized growth)
- Advanced transformation (lead/lag, logarithmic, moving average or sum)
- Can you build a custom formula?
- Apply a more complex transformation
- Synthesize several native series
For instance:
- We have a daily stock index, but you can convert it to a monthly average.
- We have the NSA index reported by the source, and have created a supplemental SA supplement.
- We have a monthly employment level, but you can show the year-over-year level change.
- We have trade expressed in one currency, but you can write a formula with an exchange rate to translate it to another currency.
- We have nominal GDP and a deflator, so you can compute real GDP.
There are certain analyses that cannot, at this time, be performed within Data Buffet:
- Seasonal adjustment
- Conversion from a moving index base to a fixed base