I am using the auto.arima package to do some basic forecasting based on CPU usage. I now have found a calendar that has various activities that partially control the computer's usage and want to factor that in (They are effectively dummy variables indicating a particular type of activity that week). Per the ARIMA instructions I am to feed those in a a vector or matrix. I am getting lost in the sand so to speak at this point. How would I prepare that data? I am pulling from a CSV that is roughly: date,usage,allocation,number of engines, theoretical max,r1,r2,...r21 So far so good just working with a copy of the CSV that is just date,usage But what should I do to disect the configuration data and the r1 to r21 dummy variables? (Some of these explain certain spikes and level shifts, forinstance r21 indicates if there was conversion activity during the week). I never really could figure out in R (only been using it a week or so) how to pull out part of an array. Also should I do my disection prior to or after concerting it into a ts object? the short of the script is (removing plots etc..): ---------- baseU000 <- read.csv("testfile.csv",header=T) #--- hmm what happens in years with a 53rd week... tsbaseU000 <- ts(baseU000,start=2004,frequency=52) #--- add regressors arimafit <- auto.arima(tsU000[,2],approximation=T,stepwise=N) forecastU000 <- forecast(arimafit,52) plot(forecastU000) lines(fitted(arimafit),col=3,lty="dashed") ---------- What I am just trying to do is build the best educated guess on what the cpu usage is going to be for some planning. As I control part of the calendar I need to start working towards the ability to do some "What-If" so I can provide future values for those dummy variables also. Soo close yet so far away.... Any suggestions?