Review of Methods for Exploratory Data Analysis for Copper Prices 1960-2020

This paper presents a statistical analysis of the historical data for global copper prices from the World Bank for the period from 1960 to 2025. This paper presents methods and results for several different approaches. The paper uses time-lag diagrams to show price transition periods as a feature of chaos theory established in other research. The paper also shows methods for using percentile rankings along different dimensions—for example, the years where the copper price increased the most. The paper also shows pathwise data analysis methods that use overlapping data samples to generate rankings about the data on a monthly basis, compared with an ensemble of values from all other paths in the dataset. For example, what did the all-time best five years in the copper markets look like based on the trailing-twelve-month price increase? The paper discusses how these methods can be used to make predictions and how the methods can be used for time series of other base metals, like zinc, or unrelated economic statistical time series.