Looking for patterns in time aligned data

adamrowe

I was hoping someone could offer me some pointers. I have a couple of data sets where I have a single Y variable ( with many observations ~60000). Each variable has an associated X (time). I wish to look for the presence of any repeating patterns in this data.

I can obviously plot x vs y but this is a very busy plot and nothing stands out, it is complicated as there are a lot of zero values as well but the occurrence of the zero values may also be significant. Is there a method that I can use in JMP to highlight any possible patterns within this data?

mfisher

Spectral analysis is what you need. You can find it under Analyze-->Modeling-->Time series, and your time variable will need to be equally-spaced. It's called spectral density under the "hot spot" in the time series plot, and spectral density will decompose your time series into frequencies. Spikes at certain frequencies of the spectral density plot give an interpretation of repeating cycles. It will give you twol plots--one for period, and one for frequency (each is the reciprocal of the other).