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Saturday, September 24, 2016

Poor frequency evaluation

If you try to create a scatter plot at FRED, a lot of times you'll get an error message like this one:

For scatter plots, both plot in a pair must have the same frequency. The following plot pair has been skipped: plot #1 with frequency Quarterly, End of Period and plot #2 with frequency Quarterly, End of Quarter.

It seems to me that if it's quarterly data, "end of period" and "end of quarter" mean the same thing. If so, FRED has no valid objection to creating the scatter plot.

I think the code that checks the frequency of the data needs an update. Looks to me that they're doing a simple character-by-character text comparison, when they should be doing a little evaluation of frequency settings.

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