xts Cheat Sheet: Time Series in R

Originally published at https://www.datacamp.com/community/blog/r-xts-cheat-sheet

Even though the data.frame object is one of the core objects to hold data in R, you'll find that it's not really efficient when you're working with time series data. You'll find yourself wanting a more flexible time series class in R that offers a variety of methods to manipulate your data.

xts or the Extensible Time Series is one of such packages that offers such a time series object. It's a powerful R package that provides an extensible time series class, enabling uniform handling of many R time series classes by extending zoo, which is the package that is the creator for an S3 class of indexed totally ordered observations which includes irregular time series.

xts has a lot to offer to make your time series analysis fast and mistake free, but it can take some time to get used to it.

This xts cheat sheet provides you not only with an overview of the xts object, how to create and inspect them, but also goes deeper into how you can manipulate time series with xts: you'll see how to replace and update values, how to select, index and subset your objects, how to handle missing values and how to perform arithmetic operations.

(Click here to download a printable version or read the online version here.)

This cheat sheet will help you to get yourself up to speed in no time!

Want to know more about xts? Check out DataCamp's Manipulating Time Series Data in R with xts & zoo course!

Originally published at www.datacamp.com.