Speaking Stata: Graphs for all Seasons

Abstract

Time series showing seasonality—marked variation with time of year—are of interest to many scientists, including climatologists, other environmental scientists, epidemiologists, and economists. The usual graphs plotting response variables against time, or even time of year, are not always the most effective at showing the fine structure of seasonality. I survey various modifications of the usual graphs and other kinds of graphs with a range of examples. Although I introduce here two new Stata commands, cycleplot and sliceplot, I emphasize exploiting standard functions, data management commands, and graph options to get the graphs desired.