# Missing Data in CausalImpact and Additional Covariates

I am looking at the fantastic R package CausalImpact and had a couple questions hopefully someone can help with.

1. What should be done when there are 0 values in a series (Y or X) due to impossible situations - for example if the series is retail sales and the stores are all closed on Sunday? Should it be coded as zero in the data or omitted?

2. Is the x in the data only to be control series (e.g. sales for retail control markets) or can additional covariates be used - e.g. other promos, demographic profiles of the markets or other events in the pre-period of either X or y?

1. A principled solution would be to model your outcome variable as a mixture distribution where one component is zero. CausalImpact doesn't currently implement such mixtures. I would set the values in question to NA.
2. Covariates in X are time series that are predictive of the outcome time series y, and whose relationship with y is stable and not influenced by the intervention. Typical examples are sales in unaffected markets, stock market indices, or the GBP.