Another attempt to explore the animate package in latex, this time using US monthly unemployment and inflation data. I plot both time series from 1948 to 2010, from the wonderful data resource FRED at the St. Louis Fed.
I also plot a scatter plot of one series against the other, or rather, the last 36 months of data at any point in time, so you are seeing what a policy-maker looking backwards for a three year inflation-unemployment trade-off might see (roughly!).
The file itself (a pdf file) is big..far too big, (about 7.5 MB) …so be warned!
You can download the file here
It should work best in Acrobat Reader. But I think my own Perl script is pretty hacky, and not in a good way. I wrote it so that the pgfplots package can generate something that the animate package can deal with. I’ll probably work on trying to get file sizes down.
Very interesting stuff. The oil crisis of the 1970s immediately stands out as the biggest shock to the stability of the relationship over time.
Thanks Tom–I guess what stands out can be sensitive enough to the choice of lag length, but I guess also that it makes the point that the underlying relationships can’t be captured with a simple two-variable trade-off. Nice work on Tascblogland by the way.