Saturday, June 17, 2017

World Coal Production Decreases For Third Straight Year

From Bloomberg News:


However, US coal production is was on a bit of an upswing in recent months.


Temporary, surely. And I don't see that Trump had any role in this whatsoever -- it started almost a year before he took office.

3 comments:

Victor Venema said...

The blue moving average line is mostly responding to the peak at the end of 2016. The last 3 points going up is mostly noise. I would smooth over a longer period because the small-scale variability is autocorrelated and then the trend would still be down.

David Appell said...

Victor: Thanks for your comment.

But how is coal production data autocorrelated?

How does what they produce in the last week depend on what they produced in the week a year ago?

Victor Venema said...

I do not know whether the correlations length is that long, but just looks at the deviations from the blue "trend" line: if one week is high, the next week is high and visa versa. Just by eye I would say that that goes for several months. Then averaging over just one year, means that you just have a few samples and the "trend" is not supposed to be noisy.