International tourists in Hawaii

Use this diagram to show that 12-point moving averages remove the seasonal pattern for monthly data.

Use the controller to increase the run length. Since there are two peaks in each year, 6-point moving averages also work reasonably well but the two peaks are not equal in height or exactly 6 months apart, so 12-point moving averages work better.

After removing the seasonal pattern, the trend is clearer.


The data set gives the numbers of international tourists in Hawaii each month from 1990 to 1999.