Chapter 12. TrendCalculus
Long before the concept of what's trending became a popular topic of study by data scientists, there was an older one that is still not well served by data science: it is that of Trends. Presently, the analysis of trends, if it can be called that, is primarily carried out by people "eyeballing" time series charts and offering interpretations. But what is it that people's eyes are doing?
This chapter describes an implementation in Apache Spark of a new algorithm for studying trends numerically, called TrendCalculus, invented by Andrew Morgan. The original reference implementation is written in the Lua language and was open-sourced in 2015, the code can be viewed at https://bitbucket.org/bytesumo/trendcalculus-public.
This chapter explains the core method, which delivers the fast extraction of trend change points on a time series; these are the moments when trends change direction. We will describe our TrendCalculus algorithm in detail...