Holt-Winters method with general seasonality

summary:The paper suggests a generalization of widely used Holt-Winters smoothing and forecasting method for seasonal time series. The general concept of seasonality modeling is introduced both for the additive and multiplicative case. Several special cases are discussed, including a linear interpolation of seasonal indices and a usage of trigonometric functions. Both methods are fully applicable for time series with irregularly observed data (just the special case of missing observations was covered up to now). Moreover, they sometimes outperform the classical Holt-Winters method even for regular time series. A simulation study and real data examples compare the suggested methods with the classical one