Question

Forgive me for this basic question. I have loaded a set of data as timeSeries in R.

> class(Return)

[1] "timeSeries"
attr(,"package")
[1] "timeSeries"

> head(Return[,1])

GMT
           Overall
2005-09-21  1.8714
2005-09-22  0.2049
2005-09-23 -1.5924
2005-09-26 -4.3111
2005-09-27 -0.2416
2005-09-28 -1.1924

When I plot this time series data, it gives me a figure with date as the label of x-axis with format "2006-01-01", "2007-01-01". How can I customise it as "2006-01" or "2006" or "2006 Jan" and how can I modify the frequency? For example I’d like to have a tick every half year instead of every year?

Any suggestion? Thank you!

Answer 1

For the label format you can use the format parameter (for info about the format options have a look at this page):

plot(Ts,format="%Y-%m") # 2006-01
plot(Ts,format="%Y-%b") # 2006-Jan
plot(Ts,format="%Y")    # 2006

While for the labels, you can set custom labels by using the at parameter, e.g. :

# compute the desired dates to show:
minDate <- timeCalendar(y=as.integer(format(min(time(Ts)),'%Y')),m=1,d=1)
maxDate <- max(time(Ts))
datesToShow = timeSequence(from=minDate,to=maxDate,by="1 year")

plot(Ts,format="%Y-%m",at=datesToShow)

For more info about the plot parameters for timeSeries objects, just type:

?timeSeries::plot