Seasonality - Measuring Seasonality

Measuring Seasonality

Seasonal variation is measured in terms of an index, called a seasonal index. It is an average that can be used to compare an actual observation relative to what it would be if there were no seasonal variation. An index value is attached to each period of the time series within a year. This implies that if monthly data are considered there are 12 separate seasonal indices, one for each month. There can also be a further 4 index values for quarterly data. The following methods use seasonal indices to measure seasonal variations of a time-series data.

• Method of simple averages
• Ratio to trend method
• Ratio-to-moving average method
• Link relatives method