Analysis 101: Time Series Analysis Answers
From your first chart you should have easily identified
that the riskiest time of day to travel the roads in your
area was between 0600 and 0900. You should probably
recommend that staff avoid travel during this period at
least until you have a better idea of what is going on.
From our second chart we can see a cluster of incidents on
Fridays (with one very early Saturday incident). So
essentially we have two distinct groupings. The first group
is comprised of weekday morning attacks while the second
group are the ‘Friday’ attacks. There are a couple of
obvious hypothesis; either two separate groups with
differing modus operandi are responsible for the incidents
or the clusters represent two different sets of intended
targets.
At this point we should probably start looking for more
collateral information. What potential targets are on the
road during these periods? What other events occur at these
times of the day or week? We also need to look at exactly
where these events occurred but that’ll have to wait for a
future instalment of Analysis 101.
For those who are wondering this scenario is based on a
real problem from my past. The details have been changed
just enough to keep me out of trouble.