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Seasonal Daily Effect on the Number of Births in Israel
Author(s) -
Cohen Ayala
Publication year - 1983
Publication title -
journal of the royal statistical society: series c (applied statistics)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.205
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9876
pISSN - 0035-9254
DOI - 10.2307/2347945
Subject(s) - names of the days of the week , demography , weekend effect , medicine , emergency medicine , philosophy , linguistics , sociology
SUMMARY The variation in number of births according to the day of the week has been reported in several studies in England, Canada, the US and Australia. According to these studies, there is a 7‐day cycle, with the least number on Sundays. Also, fewer births occur on public holidays. In Israel, Sunday is a regular working day, while Saturday is a holiday. We studied one year's daily data of the number of births in Israel and found, as expected, fewer births on Saturdays, as well as on some Israeli holidays. Unexpectedly, we also found a large number of births on one holiday. For the statistical analysis, we used the SABL package which is a seasonal adjustment package developed at Bell Laboratories. SABL uses robust methods for the decomposition of time series and provides graphical displays for the exposition and diagnostics of the results. The Israeli births data form an interesting example of the application of SABL to daily data.