Friday, May 6, 2011

What's Normalized? (and more)


From the Using the Enhanced Table Viewer (Java) section of the NIPA Help on "Locking Stubs." (I had to install Java to use Locking Stubs, but that all happened seamlessly and I had to do nothing but allow it to happen.)

Actual - Graph the actual values.
Normalized - Graph the data normalized to 100 for the first point. Obtained by dividing each number in the series by the first number in the series and then multiplying by 100. This is useful for comparing the trends of different time series.
Change - Graphs the change from one period to the next. Obtained by subtracting value(i - 1) from value(i) starting with i = 2.
% Change - Graph the change from one period to the next as a percentage. Obtained by subtracting value(i - 1) from value(i) and then dividing that quantity by value(i-1) and finally multiplying by 100.

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