Catherine Hood Consulting

History and Background

Catherine Hood Consulting began in 2006 in Auburntown, Tennessee (in an office with the prettiest views in Middle Tennessee). Catherine had recently left her job with Hendyplan, Luxembourg, and was looking for new opportunities in seasonal adjustment while living in Middle Tennessee. In 2010 the company expanded to include Roxanne Feldpausch, working out of her office in Austin, Texas.

The company maintains its web presence and client contacts through the internet with office facilities for telephone contact. Our student intern, Miriam, works on web content and runs programs to help with our forecasting projects.

Catherine C.H. Hood has over 26 years of experience providing statistical consulting services and over 23 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-12-ARIMA 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 18 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. She also teaches part-time either at the university level or teaching AP Statistics.

Roxanne Feldpausch has over 16 years of of experience as a statistician and 11 years of experience in time series. Her experience includes modeling time series using regARIMA models and using the models for forecasting, outlier detection, and to aid in seasonal adjustment.

Roxanne has extensive experience in the following areas:

• Seasonal adjustment software - including a variety of packages, but particularly X-12-ARIMA/X-13-ARIMA-SEATS. Her research has led to many changes in the X-12-ARIMA software, including a F-test for determining if a series has stable seasonality that can be modeled with fixed seasonal effect regressors and determining the optimal length for sliding span with when using a SEATS seasonal adjustment.
• Statistical time series models - for forecasting and data exploration, using diagnostics and graphs to determine the best model for a series.

Roxanne is the original designer and developer of the Windows Interface to X-12. The program was originally written in Visual Basic and later rewritten as a .NET windows based application. The application creates X-12-ARIMA input files and runs X-12-ARIMA. The application also assisted in analyzing the output by parsing the output files into a readable table-based format. Roxanne also developed Excel macros aid in using X-12-ARIMA and visualizing data. Roxanne also has extensive experience in developing time series applications in SAS.

Roxanne also has a passion for developing software that is intuitive and user-friendly. Like Catherine, Roxanne enjoys teaching time series modeling and seasonal adjustment to technical and nontechnical audiences.

Before moving to Austin with her family, Roxanne worked for the U.S. Census Bureau for 9 years. In Austin, she worked for URS as a statistical consultant for a variety of environmental issues. After taking a year sabbatical to care for her children, she is happy to be working at Catherine Hood Consulting.

Collaboration

Through Catherine's and Roxanne's 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.