R: Data Analysis and Visualization

Formatting time series data for plotting

Time series or trend charts are the most common form of line graphs. There are a lot of ways in R to plot such data. However, it is important to first format the data in a suitable format that R can understand. In this recipe, we will look at some ways of formatting time series data using the base and some additional packages.

Getting ready

In addition to the basic R functions, we will also be using the zoo package in this recipe. So, first we need to install it:

install.packages("zoo")

How to do it...

Let's use the dailysales.csv example dataset and format its date column:

sales<-read.csv("dailysales.csv") d1<-as.Date(sales$date,"%d/%m/%y") d2<-strptime(sales$date,"%d/%m/%y") data.class(d1) [1] "Date" data.class(d2) ...