incline: Estimate Local Trend in a Noisy Time Series

How fast is this series moving right now? Differencing consecutive observations amplifies noise rather than revealing signal, so incline smooths the series first and differentiates the smooth.

The second half is the part worth having: every estimator reports a standard error, and which machinery produces it is decided by what the smoother is rather than by what it is called.

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
from incline import sgolay_trend

df = pd.DataFrame(
    {"value": np.linspace(0, 10, 100) + np.random.normal(0, 0.5, 100)},
    index=pd.date_range("2020-01-01", periods=100),
)

result = sgolay_trend(df, se=True)
result[["derivative_value", "derivative_se", "significant_trend", "se_method"]].head()

significant_trend tells you where the data support saying the series is moving at all. se_method tells you how that was established.

How uncertainty is computed

Which case a smoother falls into is settled by probing it, not by assumption:

A smoother that claims to be linear has its operator checked against its own output before any exact standard error is issued, so a wrong claim raises rather than quietly producing wrong inference.

Do the standard errors work?

Measured, not asserted. tests/test_econometrics.py simulates from known truth and checks the classic properties — unbiasedness, coverage, size and power. Over 400 replicates, with the truth inside each estimator's approximation space so that smoothing bias is exactly zero:

Every bias is indistinguishable from zero and every coverage sits inside the binomial band for 0.95. Under the null the significance flag fires 3.7–7.0% of the time against a nominal 5%; under a real trend, power rises monotonically to 1.0.

What the intervals do not tell you

They describe the derivative of the fitted curve, not of reality. The gap is smoothing bias, and it is set by your bandwidth. At an oversmoothed bandwidth a perfectly calibrated interval still misses the truth — bias_correct=True re-centers it, at roughly five times the width.

The default also assumes independent noise. Under AR(1) errors with φ=0.7 that reports standard errors about a quarter of their true size and covers 39% of the time; noise="ar1" recovers most of it. See Limitations for both in full, with numbers.

Methods

from incline import (
    naive_trend,  # central differences; the baseline to beat
    sgolay_trend,  # local polynomial on a fixed window
    local_polynomial_trend,  # kernel-weighted local regression
    loess_trend,  # LOESS
    pspline_trend,  # penalized smoothing spline
    spline_trend,  # knot-selecting smoothing spline
    l1_trend_filter,  # piecewise-polynomial with sparse kinks
    gp_trend,  # Gaussian process, exact derivative posterior
    kalman_trend,  # local linear trend state-space model
)

Plus SiZer for multi-scale analysis, deseasonalize for seasonal adjustment, and trending for ranking thousands of series by how fast they are moving — propagating the standard errors, so the ranking can say which leaders are actually distinguishable from flat.

Installation

pip install incline

Documentation

finite-sample.github.io/incline — including an interactive explorer where you can move the smoothing slider and watch the interval trade width for bias.

For background on what "the trend over a window" even means, see this note.

Authors

Gaurav Sood and contributors.

License

MIT