STL Decomposition

STL Decomposition, introduced by Cleveland, Cleveland, McRae, and Terpenning (1990), is a nonparametric procedure that separates a time series into three additive components — trend, seasonal, and remainder — using iterative locally weighted regression (loess). Widely used in economics, meteorology, and data science, it handles time series of any periodicity and is robust to the presence of outliers, making it a highly flexible alternative to classical decomposition methods.