Hi everyone, This is not so much of an R question as a statistics question. I currently work for the largest pre employment screening company in Canada. Upper management has noticed that noticed that usually a month or so before any big kind of economic shock happens, that our incoming files (requests for a background check) jump up or down. As the company statistician, they've asked me to see if the relationship is strong enough to put together a product that can be sold to any kind of firm or organization (brokerages or any kind of investing firm, federal ministry of finance, statistics canada (like the bureau of stats in the USA), universities etc) In Canada on the 10th of every month, statistics canada releases labour statistics for the previous month. The way CFO sees it, *ideally* on the (1st to 10th, something like that) every month, the firm I work for could be releasing data for the rest of the month. What I'm trying to figure out is if you were in the position of evaluating the final product for purchase, what kind of information would make the product credible/viable? Summary statistics? Variance covariance matrices? Graphs of the data? Cross Correlation matrices for time series analysis? It's frustrating because I can see a noticeable relationship between our file volume and the unemployment rate (in particular,) but I'm not sure how to appropriately frame it in a way that another statistician/modeler would want the data. Any suggestions, comments, questions would be great. thanks! -Max
Max wrote:> Hi everyone, > > This is not so much of an R question as a statistics question. I > currently work for the largest pre employment screening company in > Canada. Upper management has noticed that noticed that usually a month > or so before any big kind of economic shock happens, that our incoming > files (requests for a background check) jump up or down. > > As the company statistician, they've asked me to see if the relationship > is strong enough to put together a product that can be sold to any kind > of firm or organization (brokerages or any kind of investing firm, > federal ministry of finance, statistics canada (like the bureau of stats > in the USA), universities etc) > > In Canada on the 10th of every month, statistics canada releases labour > statistics for the previous month. The way CFO sees it, *ideally* on the > (1st to 10th, something like that) every month, the firm I work for > could be releasing data for the rest of the month. > > What I'm trying to figure out is if you were in the position of > evaluating the final product for purchase, what kind of information > would make the product credible/viable? Summary statistics? Variance > covariance matrices? Graphs of the data? Cross Correlation matrices for > time series analysis? > > It's frustrating because I can see a noticeable relationship between our > file volume and the unemployment rate (in particular,) but I'm not sure > how to appropriately frame it in a way that another statistician/modeler > would want the data.Why not start with some simple plots of the relationships between your variables? Once you have a feel for the problem, you can look into modelling it more formally using a suitable regression model. -- Gad Abraham Dept. CSSE and NICTA The University of Melbourne Parkville 3010, Victoria, Australia email: gabraham at csse.unimelb.edu.au web: csse.unimelb.edu.au/~gabraham