Catherine Hood Consulting

About Us

Catherine Hood Consulting began in 2006 in Auburntown, Tennessee. Catherine had recently left her job with Hendyplan, Luxembourg, and was looking for new opportunities in seasonal adjustment while living in Middle Tennessee. Starting Catherine Hood Consulting seemed like the best way for Catherine to expand her skills in seasonal adjustment. She quickly learned that the opportunities to work on new projects for clients was a great way to motivate new software and new research projects.

Still located in Auburntown (in an office with the prettiest views in Middle Tennessee), the company maintains its web presence and client contacts through the internet, with office facilities for telephone contact with FAX capabilities. An administrative assistant keeps track of our virtual information desk and bookkeeping tasks.

Catherine C.H. Hood has over 20 years experience providing statistical consulting services and over 18 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.

She 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 12 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. Now Catherine is back in the United States, where she is continuing her research and software interests in conjunction with colleagues at the Census Bureau. She also teaches part-time at the university level and/or teaching AP Statistics.

Rachel provides office support at Catherine Hood Consulting. She has years of experience in Microsoft office products and HTML, and has recently been taking courses in statistics and time series.

Collaboration

Through Catherine's extensive contacts in the seasonal adjustment community, she often teams with outside experts. The combination of in-house expertise and topic-specific collaboration means that we can address our clients' needs.

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Contact Information/The Blogs

You can reach our information desk at "info" at catherinechhood.net.

You can also contact Catherine at cath at catherinechhood.net or Rachel at rachel at catherinechhood.net.

Catherine has several blogs about her experiences in Luxembourg and starting a new life back in the US, and also a blog about learning to run her own small consulting company.

• Seasonally Adjusting my Life
• How Not to Move to Luxembourg

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