The script is used to analyse time series data of North American rodent populations using various models. The data was collected for twenty years between 1979-1999. Since the most amount observations were made for the North American deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) (13304 observations) and the Eastern chipmunk (Tamias striatus) (8401 observations), the script selects those as default species. It was found that the best fitted models for these two species were respectively a Moving Average model with three parameters and a SARIMA(1, 0, 5) × (0, 1, 1)12 model. This makes sense, because while the deer mouse is active throughout the year, the eastern chimpunk is a more seasonal creature and spends a large amount of time in its burrow during the winter months.
The data is available online.
By choosing a model in the script, you can create a prediction for the selected rodent species. Two examples are visible here:
