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11.5 Circular Representations of Days and Years

A 24-hour clock naturally represents the progression of time through the day, moving from midnight to noon and back again in one rotation. A point on a circle divided into 24 hours is thus a natural representation for the time of day. Similarly, years cycle through the seasons and return to the season from which they started.

In human affairs, temporal effects often arise by convention. These can be modeled directly with ad-hoc predictors for holidays and weekends, or with data normalization back to natural scales for daylight savings time.