Catherine Hood Consulting

About Us

Background

Catherine Hood Consulting began in 2006. Catherine had recently left her job with Hendyplan, Luxembourg, and was looking for new opportunities in seasonal adjustment while living in Middle Tennessee. In 2017, Elijah Hood joined our staff officially after several years of student internship.

Catherine and Elijah have over 40 years combined experience in time series and statistical consulting. Their time series experience includes seasonal adjustment (including setting models and seasonal adjustment options for production), statistical time series models, ARIMA and regARIMA modeling, forecasting, and outlier detection.

Our clients and projects are quite varied. We forecast a wide variety of U.S. and international leading economic indicators and provide this information to investment companies and hedge funds. We have set up seasonal adjustment processes for organizations like the American Forest & Paper Association and small manufacturing firms. We have created statistical graphs for web marketing, sales forecasts, and dissertations. We have taught seasonal adjustment short courses at several Fortune 500 companies, including Ford Motor Company, and at banks, including the Bank of Mexico.

Through our extensive contacts in the seasonal adjustment and statistical community, we often team with experts from other organizations. The combination of in-house expertise and topic-specific collaboration means that we can address our clients' needs.

Contact Us

You can reach us through our information desk at "info" at cchhood.com. We try to answer all emails within 1 or 2 business days.

Our Staff

Catherine C.H. Hood has over 34 years of experience providing statistical consulting services and over 31 years of experience in time series. Her time series experience includes time series modeling, seasonal adjustment, ARIMA and regARIMA modeling, and setting models and seasonal adjustment options for production. Click here to view her full CV.

Catherine has extensive experience in the following areas:

• Seasonal adjustment software - including a variety of packages, but particularly X-13ARIMA-SEATS and TRAMO/SEATS, the two most widely used seasonal adjustment programs in the world. Her experience is not only with running the programs for research and large-scale production, but also in knowing the methods behind the software and the diagnostics for seasonal adjustment.
• Statistical time series models - for forecasting and data exploration, including a wide range of models such as exponential smoothing models and regARIMA (ARIMA models with regression errors) models, using mathematical formulas to identify the patterns and trends and performing statistical tests on the results for reasonableness of the models.
• Benchmarking - using software and methods to ensure that data meets certain constraints, often temporal constraints.
• Price indices - including hedonic and fixed-weight indices, using Fischer, Laspeyres, and Passche formulas.
• Quality control - using time series techniques and statistical models to monitor data, improve data quality, and improve editing/imputation methods for possibly missing data. Having extensive experience in time series analysis gives her a unique perspective on quality control issues.

In the course of her career, Catherine has worked on several different surveys, with experience in large-scale data collection, price indexes, sample design, quality assurance, and editing and imputation. She has 28 years experience developing and teaching classes on time series and seasonal adjustment. She has completed extensive research in the area of seasonal adjustment, including direct versus indirect seasonal adjustment of aggregate series, model-based seasonal adjustment procedures and diagnostics, and benchmarking. She is well-known for her talent in communicating difficult concepts in a nontechnical way that everyone can understand.

Catherine worked at the US Census Bureau for 13 years where she was the original developer of X-12-Graph and X-12-Write, and her interests still lie in programming, diagnostics, and graphics for time series and seasonal adjustment. After the Census Bureau, Catherine spent a year in Europe working on seasonal adjustment and benchmarking projects on contracts for Eurostat. Catherine continues her research and software interests in conjunction with colleagues at the Census Bureau and around the world.

Catherine loves to read quotes, and she's collected her favorite quotes (most of them concerning time series or statistics) on her Quotations Page.

Elijah Hood graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Applied Mathmematics in 2015 and dove right into his career as a statistician; however, he has been working with time series as a student intern since before college and has 14 years experience in time series and statistics. His experience includes modeling and seasonal adjusting time series in X-13-ARIMA-SEATS, as well as website maintainance and programming.

Elijah has experience in the following areas:

• Seasonal adjustment software - particularly X-12-ARIMA/X-13-ARIMA-SEATS.
• Statistical time series models - for forecasting and data exploration, using diagnostics and graphs to determine the best model for a series.
• Data Mining - collecting and analyzing large data sets for clients.

After a year at the US Census Bureau, Elijah decided that moving to Catherine Hood Consulting would provide more opportunities to pursue his passions for research, art, and seasonal adjustment. He particularly enjoys combining his passions to develop web courses for Catherine Hood Consulting.