Question

I have a time series with multiple days of data. In between each day there’s one period with no data points. How can I omit these periods when plotting the time series using ggplot2?

An artificial example shown as below, how can I get rid of the two periods where there’s no data?

code:

Time = Sys.time()+(seq(1,100)*60+c(rep(1,100)*3600*24, rep(2, 100)*3600*24, rep(3, 100)*3600*24))
Value = rnorm(length(Time))
g <- ggplot() 
g <- g + geom_line (aes(x=Time, y=Value))
g

Answer 1

First, create a grouping variable. Here, two groups are different if the time difference is larger than 1 minute:

Group <- c(0, cumsum(diff(Time) > 1))

Now three distinct panels could be created using facet_grid and the argument scales = "free_x":

library(ggplot2)
g <- ggplot(data.frame(Time, Value, Group)) + 
  geom_line (aes(x=Time, y=Value)) +
  facet_grid(~ Group, scales = "free_x")