zoo: S3 Infrastructure for Regular and Irregular Time Series

TL;DR

The paper introduces the 'zoo' R package, which provides a flexible and consistent framework for handling both regular and irregular time series data, facilitating various data operations and analysis.

Contribution

It presents a novel S3 class for indexed observations that is independent of specific index types and compatible with base R, including a subclass for regular time series integration.

Findings

Supports diverse index classes for irregular time series

Provides methods for plotting, merging, and mathematical operations

Bridges regular and irregular time series in R

Abstract

zoo is an R package providing an S3 class with methods for indexed totally ordered observations, such as discrete irregular time series. Its key design goals are independence of a particular index/time/date class and consistency with base R and the "ts" class for regular time series. This paper describes how these are achieved within zoo and provides several illustrations of the available methods for "zoo" objects which include plotting, merging and binding, several mathematical operations, extracting and replacing data and index, coercion and NA handling. A subclass "zooreg" embeds regular time series into the "zoo" framework and thus bridges the gap between regular and irregular time series classes in R.