# Data provenance — T1-forecast

All observed series were retrieved by the task designer on 2026-10-30 (between 04:00 and 04:01 UTC) from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis FRED and ALFRED services, exactly as served (CSV, one header line, observation_date in YYYY-MM-DD, empty value field where the source reports no value). No value was altered. Row counts are data rows (lines after the header).

# Series

• RSAFS — Advance Retail Sales: Retail Trade and Food Services, Total. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Advance Monthly Sales for Retail and Food Services (via FRED). Units: millions of dollars, seasonally adjusted, monthly, 1992-01 onward. The advance estimate of a month is normally published in the middle of the following month and is revised in the two following monthly releases and in annual revisions; a month-end ALFRED vintage therefore normally contains the months up to the month before the vintage date. The vintage grid in this bundle shows departures from this pattern (e.g. the vintages of 2025-10-31 and 2026-03-31 end two months before their date; the vintage of 2026-04-30 adds two months at once), which reflect the actual publication calendar; the task rules refer to the last month present in each vintage, not to the calendar.
• PAYEMS — All Employees, Total Nonfarm. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics (via FRED). Units: thousands of persons, seasonally adjusted, monthly, 1939-01 onward. Published in the Employment Situation release on the first Friday (normally) of the following month and revised in the two following releases and in annual benchmark revisions; the ALFRED vintages dated as the RSAFS vintages give the data available at each origin.
• UMCSENT — University of Michigan: Consumer Sentiment, index 1966Q1 = 100, monthly (quarterly before 1978; empty fields where no survey was conducted). Source: University of Michigan, Surveys of Consumers (via FRED). The preliminary reading of a month is published in the middle of the month and the final reading at the end of the month; the series is not revised afterwards. The current FRED vintage is provided; at a month-end origin the final reading of the origin month is available (verified on the ALFRED vintages of 2025-10-31, 2026-03-31 and 2026-07-31, which contain the origin month).
• first_release.csv — the first month-end ALFRED vintage in which each target month appears, the level printed there, the level of the month twelve months earlier in the same vintage, and the year-over-year growth 100·ln(ratio) (6 decimals). "First release" is defined at month-end granularity: for RSAFS the advance estimate is the only release of a month that can appear in the month-end vintage of the following month, so the value equals the advance estimate except where the publication calendar was disrupted (then it is the first published value as of the first month-end on which it existed).

# Terms

FRED/ALFRED data are provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis under its terms of use (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/legal/); the underlying series are U.S. government statistics (Census Bureau, BLS: public domain) and the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers index (redistributed by FRED with permission; cite "University of Michigan, University of Michigan: Consumer Sentiment [UMCSENT], retrieved from FRED"). The data are reproduced here unchanged for research use.