UK car production: The rise, fall and rise again:

For this worksheet, you should access the following annual data from the TimeWeb sample data:

FFAAAU - UK passenger car production (thousands) NSA 1946 - 2000

OK, first of all you're asked to find a measure of the central tendency within the time series. Which measure would you choose?

There is some help available in selecting the best measure.

The best way to calculate the central tendency within this large dataset is to use your spreadsheet package.

Try this and then answer the following questions (you should be able to put the data straight into a spreadsheet if you download it in CSV format):

Now, to smooth out the data series; choose to use a four-year period to calculate the moving average.

Extension Activity:

Find the trend in the data by calculating a central moving average, using pairs of values from the four-year moving average data.

There is an Excel file (Excel file 21K) available with our worked version of this exercise.

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