TheilSen: Tests for trends using Theil-Sen estimates

In openair: Tools for the Analysis of Air Pollution Data

Tests for trends using Theil-Sen estimates

Description

Theil-Sen slope estimates and tests for trend. The TheilSen function is flexible in the sense that it can be applied to data in many ways e.g. by day of the week, hour of day and wind direction. This flexibility makes it much easier to draw inferences from data e.g. why is there a strong downward trend in concentration from one wind sector and not another, or why trends on one day of the week or a certain time of day are unexpected.

Usage

TheilSen(
  mydata,
  pollutant = "nox",
  deseason = FALSE,
  type = "default",
  avg.time = "month",
  statistic = "mean",
  percentile = NA,
  data.thresh = 0,
  alpha = 0.05,
  dec.place = 2,
  lab.frac = 0.99,
  lab.cex = 0.8,
  x.relation = "same",
  y.relation = "same",
  data.col = "cornflowerblue",
  trend = list(lty = c(1, 5), lwd = c(2, 1), col = c("red", "red")),
  text.col = "darkgreen",
  slope.text = NULL,
  cols = NULL,
  auto.text = TRUE,
  autocor = FALSE,
  slope.percent = FALSE,
  date.breaks = 7,
  date.format = NULL,
  strip.position = "top",
  plot = TRUE,
  silent = FALSE,
  ...
)

Arguments

mydata	A data frame containing the field date and at least one other parameter for which a trend test is required; typically (but not necessarily) a pollutant.
pollutant	The parameter for which a trend test is required. Mandatory.
deseason	Should the data be de-deasonalized first? If TRUE the function stl is used (seasonal trend decomposition using loess). Note that if TRUE missing data are first imputed using a Kalman filter and Kalman smooth.
type	Character string(s) defining how data should be split/conditioned before plotting. "default" produces a single panel using the entire dataset. Any other options will split the plot into different panels - a roughly square grid of panels if one type is given, or a 2D matrix of panels if two types are given. type is always passed to cutData(), and can therefore be any of: A built-in type defined in cutData() (e.g., "season", "year", "weekday", etc.). For example, type = "season" will split the plot into four panels, one for each season. The name of a numeric column in mydata, which will be split into n.levels quantiles (defaulting to 4). The name of a character or factor column in mydata, which will be used as-is. Commonly this could be a variable like "site" to ensure data from different monitoring sites are handled and presented separately. It could equally be any arbitrary column created by the user (e.g., whether a nearby possible pollutant source is active or not). Most openair plotting functions can take two type arguments. If two are given, the first is used for the columns and the second for the rows.
avg.time	Can be “month” (the default), “season” or “year”. Determines the time over which data should be averaged. Note that for “year”, six or more years are required. For “season” the data are split up into spring: March, April, May etc. Note that December is considered as belonging to winter of the following year.
statistic	Statistic used for calculating monthly values. Default is “mean”, but can also be “percentile”. See timeAverage() for more details.
percentile	Single percentile value to use if statistic = "percentile" is chosen.
data.thresh	The data capture threshold to use (%) when aggregating the data using avg.time. A value of zero means that all available data will be used in a particular period regardless if of the number of values available. Conversely, a value of 100 will mean that all data will need to be present for the average to be calculated, else it is recorded as NA.
alpha	For the confidence interval calculations of the slope. The default is 0.05. To show 99\ trend, choose alpha = 0.01 etc.
dec.place	The number of decimal places to display the trend estimate at. The default is 2.
lab.frac	Fraction along the y-axis that the trend information should be printed at, default 0.99.
lab.cex	Size of text for trend information.
x.relation, y.relation	This determines how the x- and y-axis scales are plotted. "same" ensures all panels use the same scale and "free" will use panel-specific scales. The latter is a useful setting when plotting data with very different values.
data.col	Colour name for the data
trend	list containing information on the line width, line type and line colour for the main trend line and confidence intervals respectively.
text.col	Colour name for the slope/uncertainty numeric estimates
slope.text	The text shown for the slope (default is ‘units/year’).
cols	Predefined colour scheme, currently only enabled for "greyscale".
auto.text	Either TRUE (default) or FALSE. If TRUE titles and axis labels will automatically try and format pollutant names and units properly, e.g., by subscripting the "2" in "NO2". Passed to quickText().
autocor	Should autocorrelation be considered in the trend uncertainty estimates? The default is FALSE. Generally, accounting for autocorrelation increases the uncertainty of the trend estimate — sometimes by a large amount.
slope.percent	Should the slope and the slope uncertainties be expressed as a percentage change per year? The default is FALSE and the slope is expressed as an average units/year change e.g. ppb. Percentage changes can often be confusing and should be clearly defined. Here the percentage change is expressed as 100 * (C.end/C.start - 1) / (end.year - start.year). Where C.start is the concentration at the start date and C.end is the concentration at the end date. For avg.time = "year" (end.year - start.year) will be the total number of years - 1. For example, given a concentration in year 1 of 100 units and a percentage reduction of 5%/yr, after 5 years there will be 75 units but the actual time span will be 6 years i.e. year 1 is used as a reference year. Things are slightly different for monthly values e.g. avg.time = "month", which will use the total number of months as a basis of the time span and is therefore able to deal with partial years. There can be slight differences in the %/yr trend estimate therefore, depending on whether monthly or annual values are considered.
date.breaks	Number of major x-axis intervals to use. The function will try and choose a sensible number of dates/times as well as formatting the date/time appropriately to the range being considered. The user can override this behaviour by adjusting the value of date.breaks up or down.
date.format	This option controls the date format on the x-axis. A sensible format is chosen by default, but the user can set date.format to override this. For format types see strptime(). For example, to format the date like "Jan-2012" set date.format = "\%b-\%Y".
strip.position	Location where the facet 'strips' are located when using type. When one type is provided, can be one of "left", "right", "bottom" or "top". When two types are provided, this argument defines whether the strips are "switched" and can take either "x", "y", or "both". For example, "x" will switch the 'top' strip locations to the bottom of the plot.
plot	When openair plots are created they are automatically printed to the active graphics device. plot = FALSE deactivates this behaviour. This may be useful when the plot data is of more interest, or the plot is required to appear later (e.g., later in a Quarto document, or to be saved to a file).
silent	When FALSE the function will give updates on trend-fitting progress.
...	Addition options are passed on to cutData() for type handling. Some additional arguments are also available: xlab, ylab and main override the x-axis label, y-axis label, and plot title. layout sets the layout of facets - e.g., layout(2, 5) will have 2 columns and 5 rows. fontsize overrides the overall font size of the plot. cex, lwd, and pch control various graphical parameters. ylim and xlim control axis limits.

Details

For data that are strongly seasonal, perhaps from a background site, or a pollutant such as ozone, it will be important to deseasonalise the data (using the option deseason = TRUE.Similarly, for data that increase, then decrease, or show sharp changes it may be better to use smoothTrend().

A minimum of 6 points are required for trend estimates to be made.

Note! that since version 0.5-11 openair uses Theil-Sen to derive the p values also for the slope. This is to ensure there is consistency between the calculated p value and other trend parameters i.e. slope estimates and uncertainties. The p value and all uncertainties are calculated through bootstrap simulations.

Note that the symbols shown next to each trend estimate relate to how statistically significant the trend estimate is: p $<$ 0.001 = ***, p $<$ 0.01 = **, p $<$ 0.05 = * and p $<$ 0.1 = $+$.

Some of the code used in TheilSen is based on that from Rand Wilcox. This mostly relates to the Theil-Sen slope estimates and uncertainties. Further modifications have been made to take account of correlated data based on Kunsch (1989). The basic function has been adapted to take account of auto-correlated data using block bootstrap simulations if autocor = TRUE (Kunsch, 1989). We follow the suggestion of Kunsch (1989) of setting the block length to n(1/3) where n is the length of the time series.

The slope estimate and confidence intervals in the slope are plotted and numerical information presented.

Value

an openair object. The data component of the TheilSen output includes two subsets: main.data, the monthly data res2 the trend statistics. For output <- TheilSen(mydata, "nox"), these can be extracted as object$data$main.data and object$data$res2, respectively. Note: In the case of the intercept, it is assumed the y-axis crosses the x-axis on 1/1/1970.

Author(s)

David Carslaw with some trend code from Rand Wilcox

References

Helsel, D., Hirsch, R., 2002. Statistical methods in water resources. US Geological Survey. Note that this is a very good resource for statistics as applied to environmental data.

Hirsch, R. M., Slack, J. R., Smith, R. A., 1982. Techniques of trend analysis for monthly water-quality data. Water Resources Research 18 (1), 107-121.

Kunsch, H. R., 1989. The jackknife and the bootstrap for general stationary observations. Annals of Statistics 17 (3), 1217-1241.

Sen, P. K., 1968. Estimates of regression coefficient based on Kendall's tau. Journal of the American Statistical Association 63(324).

Theil, H., 1950. A rank invariant method of linear and polynomial regression analysis, i, ii, iii. Proceedings of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie Wetenschappen, Series A - Mathematical Sciences 53, 386-392, 521-525, 1397-1412.

... see also several of the Air Quality Expert Group (AQEG) reports for the use of similar tests applied to UK/European air quality data.

See Also

Other time series and trend functions: calendarPlot(), smoothTrend(), timePlot(), timeProp(), timeVariation()

Examples

# trend plot for nox
TheilSen(mydata, pollutant = "nox")

# trend plot for ozone with p=0.01 i.e. uncertainty in slope shown at
# 99 % confidence interval

## Not run: 
TheilSen(mydata, pollutant = "o3", ylab = "o3 (ppb)", alpha = 0.01)

## End(Not run)

# trend plot by each of 8 wind sectors
## Not run: 
TheilSen(mydata, pollutant = "o3", type = "wd", ylab = "o3 (ppb)")

## End(Not run)

# and for a subset of data (from year 2000 onwards)
## Not run: 
TheilSen(selectByDate(mydata, year = 2000:2005), pollutant = "o3", ylab = "o3 (ppb)")

## End(Not run)

openair documentation built on April 2, 2026, 9:07 a.m.