Answer to Question #118791 in Statistics and Probability for Toni

Question

You are given a time series with data about sales over 5 years, with one data point per day. You observe that, every 26 weeks, there is a peak in sales that slowly decreases until the next 26 weeks period. You decide to use a moving average to calculate the trend of sales while smoothing the seasonality. What would be the most appropriate period for the moving average? In other words, how many data points should be used to calculate each value of the moving average?

Just the number of the data points is needed, thank you!! :)

Answer 1

The number of time periods in 5 years is

$$n=\frac{5\cdot365}{26}=70$$

data points.