The Time Series Object

Time series data has unique features and a special signature that distinguishes it from other types of data. Among those features, you can find the series timestamp (or the series index), the series frequency and cycle, and the time interval in which the data was captured. We will discuss these features in detail in this chapter. These sets of features, as you will see throughout this book, are more than just a convenient data structure, as they have a meaningful statistical application for both a descriptive and predictive analysis of time series data. R provides several classes for representing time series objects for a variety of applications. Among those classes, ts is one of the main formats for time series data in R, mainly due to its simplicity and the wide adoption of this class by the main packages in R for time series analysis, for example, the...