Getting Started: X11 Procedure

The most common use of the X11 procedure is to produce a seasonally adjusted series. Eliminating the seasonal component from an economic series facilitates comparison among consecutive months or quarters. A plot of the seasonally adjusted series is often more informative about trends or location in a business cycle than a plot of the unadjusted series.

The following example shows how to use PROC X11 to produce a seasonally adjusted series, , from an original series .

In the multiplicative model, the trend cycle component keeps the same scale as the original series , while , , and vary around 1.0. In all printed tables and in the output data set, these latter components are expressed as percentages, and thus will vary around 100.0 (in the additive case, they vary around 0.0).

The naming convention used in PROC X11 for the tables follows the original U.S. Bureau of the Census X-11 Seasonal Adjustment program specification (Shiskin, Young, and Musgrave; 1967). Also, see the section Printed Output. This convention is outlined in Figure 31.1.

The tables corresponding to parts A – C are intermediate calculations. The final estimates of the individual components are found in the D tables: table D10 contains the final seasonal factors, table D12 contains the final trend cycle, and table D13 contains the final irregular series. If you are primarily interested in seasonally adjusting a series without consideration of intermediate calculations or diagnostics, you only need to look at table D11, the final seasonally adjusted series.

For further details about the X-11-ARIMA tables, see Ladiray and Quenneville (2001).