Displaying Time Series, Spatial, and Space-Time Data with R

Chapter 2

Displaying Time Series: Introduction

A time series is a sequence of observations registered at consecutive time instants. When these time instants are evenly spaced, the distance between them is called the sampling interval. The visualization of time series is intended to reveal changes of one or more quantitative variables through time, and to display the relationships between the variables and their evolution through time.

The standard time series graph displays the time along the horizontal axis. Several variants of this approach can be found in Chapter 3. On the other hand, time can be conceived as a grouping or conditioning variable (Chapter 4). This solution allows several variables to be displayed together with a scatterplot, ...