Hi,
Hope this does not sound too ignorant . I am trying to detrend and transform variables to achieve normality and stationarity (for time series use, namely spectral analysis). I am using the boxcox transformations. As my dataset contains zeros, I found I need to add a constant to it in order to run "boxcox". I have ran tests adding several types of constants, from .0001 (my unit of measurement) to 10 (still way below my maximum value). Most of my data concentrates in low values. I found the estimate of lambda changes drastically (from positive to negative) with the successive constants. I also found that normality (evaluated by running Shapiro and Jarque Bera test) after performing the suggested transformation obtained from "box-cox" is maximized for constant=0.0001(pvalues>0.7, lambda=0.2) and not for constant=1 (p-values <0.01, lambda=-0.94). Curiously, running the Shapiro tests with constant=1 and across lambda values, the highest p-value was obtained with lambda=0.2 (and not -0.94!) Why does box-cox() return lambda values that are so far from "creating" normality in the data? What type of best estimates are they? How should I choose the constant? I have skimmed (I am not a statistician.) through the Box-Cox(1964) paper and found no reference to this. So, any suggestion will be precious, Nuno [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.