<p>Bounties do help, but they're absolutely no guarantee.</p>

<p>Before contemplating a bounty you should endeavor to make your question as clear as possible. That will usually involve a reduction in jargon, and explaining as if readers are broadly knowledgeable of basic statistical ideas, but not necessarily familiar at all with your particular application. Your question should not just speak to experts on your problem, nor just to statistical experts, but later readers who may be relative statistical novices who are also unfamiliar with your problem (but may nevertheless find parallels to you problem if they can come to understand it, and so may benefit from the answer).</p>

<p>Without that, I don't think there's likely to be much to gain from a bounty. Getting a post to this point may require a fair bit of effort.</p>

<p>For example, in spite of having done my PhD thesis on a time series topic, I didn't even follow the entirety of your paragraph labelled "1." -- and I didn't feel any impulse to try to put in the effort required to decipher it any further. Without a bit more explanation/clarity, no bonus would be likely to induce me to do so.</p>

<p>Tell you what ... if you make the question nice and clear*, preferably with pictures --  I'll gladly put a bonus on it myself. You may have to nudge me with a comment, though, so I know you want me to look.</p>

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<p>I don't think the question is sufficiently clear yet, but I'll improve my offer - if <em>any</em> two moderate-reputation readers (>500 rep, say) here think the question is either reasonably clear <em>or</em> think it nevertheless stands a good chance of an answer with a bonus in its present form (and let me know they think so), I will put up a bonus of at least 100 points. </p>

<p>If the question is later modified, and two such users then decide it counts as above (and let me know), then as long as it hasn't already had a bonus I will put up a 100 point bonus (at least) at that time, as long as I am still an active user.</p>

<p>[So there's a really good reason to try to improve the question - you just have to get it to a point where two people think it's worth trying a bonus on, and I'll supply the bonus.]</p>

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<p>*(think <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive" rel="nofollow">ELI5</a>, and you probably won't go too far wrong)</p>
