For decomposing a time series into seasonal components, you need at least 2 seasons worth of data. If you have even one data point less, you will see this error message. blockLength <- 52 ts1 <- ts(rnorm(2*blockLength-1), frequency=blockLength) decompose(ts1) # error ts2 <- ts(rnorm(2*blockLength), frequency=blockLength) decompose(ts2) # OK