Book Image

Hands-On Time Series Analysis with R

By : Rami Krispin
Book Image

Hands-On Time Series Analysis with R

By: Rami Krispin

Overview of this book

Time-series analysis is the art of extracting meaningful insights from, and revealing patterns in, time-series data using statistical and data visualization approaches. These insights and patterns can then be utilized to explore past events and forecast future values in the series. This book explores the basics of time-series analysis with R and lays the foundation you need to build forecasting models. You will learn how to preprocess raw time-series data and clean and manipulate data with packages such as stats, lubridate, xts, and zoo. You will analyze data using both descriptive statistics and rich data visualization tools in R including the TSstudio, plotly, and ggplot2 packages. The book then delves into traditional forecasting models such as time-series linear regression, exponential smoothing (Holt, Holt-Winter, and more) and Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models with the stats and forecast packages. You'll also work on advanced time-series regression models with machine learning algorithms such as random forest and Gradient Boosting Machine using the h2o package. By the end of this book, you will have developed the skills necessary for exploring your data, identifying patterns, and building a forecasting model using various traditional and machine learning methods.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Date and time objects in R

The base package, one of R's core packages, provides two types of date and time classes:

  1. Date: This is a simple representation of a calendar date following the ISO 8601 international standard format (or the Gregorian calendar format) using the YYYY-m-d date format. Each date object has a numeric value of the number of days since the origin point (the default setting is 1970-01-01). In the Handling numeric date objects section in this chapter, we will discuss the usage of the origin in the reformatting process of date objects in more detail. It will make sense to use this format when the frequency of the data is daily or lower (for example, monthly, quarterly, and so on) and the time of the day doesn't matter.
  2. POSIXct/POSIXlt: Also known as the DateTime classes (that is, they represent both date and time), these are two POSIX date/time classes...