ggplot2 Essentials

Time series

In this section, we will cover a special case of data you may find in R—the time series. This class of data is used in R to represent time data, such as hours, years, or dates in general. Of the data available in the R installation, there are some datasets containing time series, such as the UKgas and economics datasets. For our simple example, we will use the latter, which is a data frame containing population and employment information in the US over the last 40 years. You can find an overview of the dataset information in the help page at ?economics.

Let's first have a look to the dataset and see its structure:

head(economics)
     date         pce        pop      psavert     uempmed     unemploy
1 1967-06-30     507.8     198712       9.8         4.5           2944
2 1967-07-31 510.9 198911 ...