Abstract We present a statistical methodology for investigating oscillations in the underlying number of causes contributing to a phenomenon. We utilize the Walsh transform of a ternary signal derived from the unbiased MLEs of the shape parameters in an ordinal indexed series of Pareto distributions. To this end, we outline the details of our methodology, discuss a simulation study, and apply our method to real world data (NHTSA recall data). Our results indicate that the proposed methodology is able to reliably detect oscillations in the shape parameter.
M. Thornton (Mon,) studied this question.