The Significance of Trend Values

The object of finding the time series trend is to enable the underlying tendency of the data to be highlighted. Thus, a business sales trend will normally show whether sales are moving up or down (or remaining static) in the long term.

The Trend can also be thought of as the core component of the additive time series model about which the two other components, Seasonal (S) and Residual (R) Variation, fluctuate. This component is found by identifying seperate Trend (T) values, each corresponding to a time point.