New Year Covar Analysis

The second of two newly defined New Year analyses based on examining the data for previous years looks at the epoch average of the smoothed Covar statistic. This is almost exactly the same as the smoothed variance analysis used previously. Again we used a "data-mining" assessment of seven years of data around the New Year transition to develop a new hypothesis to test on future data. This showed that a good choice would be the same 13 timezones as used in the Devvar-Netvar analysis, with the epochs defined as in previous years, namely the 10 minutes centered on midnight, and a smoothing window of 4 minutes, as before. The statistic is also the same as previously used. A permutation analysis (10,000 permutations) provides a distribution for the result of multiplying the magnitude of the deviation at smoothed curve minimum times its proximity to midnight. The min*prox measure for this year is compared to the distribution.

For 2006, the resulting Z-score is 0.880, with p=0.189. This positive outcome is in line with the average Z over the previous seven years. A graphic version will be added here when available.