tsibble

The tsibble package provides a data infrastructure for tidy temporal data with wrangling tools. Adapting the tidy data principles, tsibble is a data- and model-oriented object. In tsibble:

1. Index is a variable with inherent ordering from past to present.
2. Key is a set of variables that define observational units over time.
3. Each observation should be uniquely identified by index and key.
4. Each observational unit should be measured at a common interval, if regularly spaced.

Installation

You could install the stable version on CRAN:

install.packages("tsibble")

You could install the development version from Github using

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("tidyverts/tsibble")

Get started

Coerce to a tsibble with as_tsibble()

To coerce a data frame to tsibble, we need to declare key and index. For example, in the weather data from the package nycflights13, the time_hour containing the date-times should be declared as index, and the origin as key. Other columns can be considered as measured variables.

library(dplyr)
library(tsibble)
weather <- nycflights13::weather %>% 
  select(origin, time_hour, temp, humid, precip)
weather_tsbl <- as_tsibble(weather, key = origin, index = time_hour)
weather_tsbl
#> # A tsibble: 26,115 x 5 [1h] <America/New_York>
#> # Key:       origin [3]
#>   origin time_hour            temp humid precip
#>   <chr>  <dttm>              <dbl> <dbl>  <dbl>
#> 1 EWR    2013-01-01 01:00:00  39.0  59.4      0
#> 2 EWR    2013-01-01 02:00:00  39.0  61.6      0
#> 3 EWR    2013-01-01 03:00:00  39.0  64.4      0
#> 4 EWR    2013-01-01 04:00:00  39.9  62.2      0
#> 5 EWR    2013-01-01 05:00:00  39.0  64.4      0
#> # ℹ 26,110 more rows

The key can be comprised of empty, one, or more variables. See package?tsibble and vignette("intro-tsibble") for details.

The interval is computed from index based on the representation, ranging from year to nanosecond, from numerics to ordered factors. The table below shows how tsibble interprets some common time formats.

Interval	Class
Annual	integer/double
Quarterly	yearquarter
Monthly	yearmonth
Weekly	yearweek
Daily	Date/difftime
Subdaily	POSIXt/difftime/hms

A full list of index classes supported by tsibble can be found in package?tsibble.

fill_gaps() to turn implicit missing values into explicit missing values

Often there are implicit missing cases in time series. If the observations are made at regular time interval, we could turn these implicit missingness to be explicit simply using fill_gaps(), filling gaps in precipitation (precip) with 0 in the meanwhile. It is quite common to replaces NAs with its previous observation for each origin in time series analysis, which is easily done using fill() from tidyr.

full_weather <- weather_tsbl %>%
  fill_gaps(precip = 0) %>% 
  group_by_key() %>% 
  tidyr::fill(temp, humid, .direction = "down")
full_weather
#> # A tsibble: 26,190 x 5 [1h] <America/New_York>
#> # Key:       origin [3]
#> # Groups:    origin [3]
#>   origin time_hour            temp humid precip
#>   <chr>  <dttm>              <dbl> <dbl>  <dbl>
#> 1 EWR    2013-01-01 01:00:00  39.0  59.4      0
#> 2 EWR    2013-01-01 02:00:00  39.0  61.6      0
#> 3 EWR    2013-01-01 03:00:00  39.0  64.4      0
#> 4 EWR    2013-01-01 04:00:00  39.9  62.2      0
#> 5 EWR    2013-01-01 05:00:00  39.0  64.4      0
#> # ℹ 26,185 more rows

fill_gaps() also handles filling in time gaps by values or functions, and respects time zones for date-times. Wanna a quick overview of implicit missing values? Check out vignette("implicit-na").

index_by() + summarise() to aggregate over calendar periods

index_by() is the counterpart of group_by() in temporal context, but it groups the index only. In conjunction with index_by(), summarise() aggregates interested variables over time periods. index_by() goes hand in hand with the index functions including as.Date(), yearweek(), yearmonth(), and yearquarter(), as well as other friends from lubridate. For example, it would be of interest in computing average temperature and total precipitation per month, by applying yearmonth() to the index variable (referred to as .).

full_weather %>%
  group_by_key() %>%
  index_by(year_month = ~ yearmonth(.)) %>% # monthly aggregates
  summarise(
    avg_temp = mean(temp, na.rm = TRUE),
    ttl_precip = sum(precip, na.rm = TRUE)
  )
#> # A tsibble: 36 x 4 [1M]
#> # Key:       origin [3]
#>   origin year_month avg_temp ttl_precip
#>   <chr>       <mth>    <dbl>      <dbl>
#> 1 EWR      2013 Jan     35.6       3.53
#> 2 EWR      2013 Feb     34.2       3.83
#> 3 EWR      2013 Mar     40.1       3   
#> 4 EWR      2013 Apr     53.0       1.47
#> 5 EWR      2013 May     63.3       5.44
#> # ℹ 31 more rows

While collapsing rows (like summarise()), group_by() and index_by() will take care of updating the key and index respectively. This index_by() + summarise() combo can help with regularising a tsibble of irregular time space too.

Learn more about tsibble

An ecosystem, the tidyverts, is built around the tsibble object for tidy time series analysis.

• The tsibbledata package curates a range of tsibble data examples to poke around the tsibble object.
• The feasts package provides support for visualising the data and extracting time series features.
• The fable package provides common forecasting methods for tsibble, such as ARIMA and ETS. The fabletools package, which is fable built upon, lays the modelling infrastructure to ease the programming with tsibble.

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