Over-whitening or Pre-whitening in Hydro-climatological Trend Analysis?

To meet the basic assumption of classical Mann-Kendall (MK) trend analysis, which requires serially independent time series, a pre-whitening (PW) procedure is proposed to alleviate the serial correlation structure of a given hydro-meteorological time series records for application. The procedure is simply to take the lagged differences in a given time series in the hope that the new time series will have an independent serial correlation coefficient. The whole idea was originally based on the first-order autoregressive AR (1) process, but such a procedure has been documented to damage the trend component in the original time series. On the other hand, the over-whitening procedure (OW) proposes a white noise process superposition of the same length with zero mean and some standard deviation on the original time series to convert it into serially independent series without any damage to the trend component. The stationary white noise addition does not have any trend components. For trend identification, annual average temperature records in New Jersey and Istanbul are presented to show the difference between PW and OW procedures. It turned out that the OW procedure was superior to the PW procedure, which did not cause a loss in the original trend component.

Trend identification with the relative strength index (RSI) technical indicator –A conceptual study

We all must agree that the word "trend" is now the buzzword of the stock market. As a part of investment strategy and analysis, it is always suggested that the investors should keep an eye on medium-term and short-term changes in addition to longer-term (secular) patterns. Traders and investors use the RSI as a momentum indicator. Overbought and oversold situations are indicated by RSI values between 70 and 30. Over the past two decades, several techniques have been developed to analyze NIFTY 50 data for investment purposes. In this paper, we have estimated the returns by looking at the two trends i.e., 50-50 and 60-40. In addition to this, how to trade and back-test our strategy is also explained. Applying these two RSI strategies to the NIFTY 50 chart revealed that 50-50 offers a higher long-term return, while 60-40 provides a superior short-term return. Finally, the strategies' returns F-statistics and P-values were calculated and analyzed to determine their significance level and acceptability.

Global Sensitivity Analysis of Groundwater Related Dike Stability under Extreme Loading Conditions

With up to 15% of the world’s population being protected by dikes from flooding, climate-change-induced river levels may dramatically increase the flood risk of these societies. Reliable assessments of dike stability will become increasingly important, but groundwater flow through dikes is often oversimplified due to limited understanding of the important process parameters. To improve the understanding of these parameters, we performed a global sensitivity analysis on a comprehensive hydro-stability model. The sensitivity analysis encompassed fifteen parameters related to geometry, drainage conditions and material properties. The following three sensitivity settings were selected to characterize model behavior: parameter prioritization, trend identification and interaction qualification. The first two showed that dike stability is mostly dependent on the dike slope, followed by the type of subsurface material. Interaction quantification indicated a very prominent interaction between the dike and subsurface material, as it influences both groundwater conditions and dike stability directly. Despite our relatively simple model setup, a database containing the results of the extensive Monte Carlo analysis succeeded in finding most of the unsafe sections identified by the official inspection results. This supports the applicability of our results and demonstrates that both geometry and subsurface parameters affect the groundwater conditions and dike stability.

Crossing Empirical Trend Analysis (CETA) At Risk Levels In Hydro-Meteorological Time Series

Trend identification procedures are employed to determine the systematic monotonic trend lines in a given hydro-meteorological time series records for depiction of time dependent changes in the form of increase or decrease. Different methodologies are proposed for such identifications, but most of them require restrictive assumptions such as the normal (Gaussian) probability distribution, serial independence and long sample sizes. In order to relieve especially the serial independence requirement pre-whitening and over-whitening procedures are suggested, but they cannot render a serially dependent series into completely independent structure. In this paper, a new trend methodology is proposed on the basis of crossing features along any given straight-line within the given time series and the one with the maximum crossing number is the searched trend component. This approach does not require any restrictive assumption. Contrary to the previous trend algorithms, the suggested crossing empirical trend analysis (CETA) yields not a single trend, but a set of trends at different levels within the variation range of hydro-meteorological time series records. In this paper for the sake of brevity only three levels are considered at 10%, 50% and 90% risk levels. The comparison of the CETA approach is presented with the classical and frequently used method of Mann-Kendall (MK) trend identification procedure based on the Sen’s slope calculation. For small serial correlation coefficients and normal probability distribution (PDF) function cases CETA and classical technique yield almost the same trend line within +5% error band limits. The application of this methodology is presented for monthly and annual discharge records of Danube River and annual precipitation records from seven geographical regions of Turkey.

An Enhanced Innovative Triangular Trend Analysis of Rainfall Based on a Spectral Approach

The world is currently witnessing high rainfall variability at the spatiotemporal level. In this paper, data from three representative rain gauges in northern Algeria, from 1920 to 2011, at an annual scale, were used to assess a relatively new hybrid method, which combines the innovative triangular trend analysis (ITTA) with the orthogonal discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for partial trend identification. The analysis revealed that the period from 1950 to 1975 transported the wettest periods, followed by a long-term dry period beginning in 1973. The analysis also revealed a rainfall increase during the latter decade. The combined method (ITTA–DWT) showed a good efficiency for extreme rainfall event detection. In addition, the analysis indicated the inter- to multiannual phenomena that explained the short to medium processes that dominated the high rainfall variability, masking the partial trend components existing in the rainfall time series and making the identification of such trends a challenging task. The results indicate that the approaches—combining ITTA and selected input combination models resulting from the DWT—are auspicious compared to those found using the original rainfall observations. This analysis revealed that the ITTA–DWT method outperformed the ITTA method for partial trend identification, which proved DWT’s efficiency as a coupling method.

Analysis of long-term trends of world prices for agricultural products

The issues related to the long-term pricing process in the world market of agricultural products are discussed in the paper. It is noted that international trade of agro-industrial products, namely the fishery commodities, is one of the key components of the global economy. A detailed analysis of export prices for agricultural products was carried out along with the current trend identification. It is noted that a qualitative analysis of long-term trends of changes of world prices for agricultural products, namely fishery products, can serve as a basis for strategic forecasting of development of the most important sectors of the Russian economy.