Plotting monthly time series in R should be simpler - r

Question

R could be amazingly powerful and frustrating at the same time. This makes teaching R to non-statisticians (business students in my case) rather challenging. Let me illustrate this with a simple task.
Let's say you are working with a monthly time series dataset. Most business data are usually plotted as monthly time series. We would like to plot the data such that the x-axis depicts a combination of month and year. For instance, January 2017 could be depicted as 2017-01. It should be straightforward with the plot command. Not true.
Data Generation
Let's illustrate this with an example. I'll generate a random time series of monthly data for 120 observations representing 10 years of information starting in January 2007 and ending in December 2017. Here's the code.
set.seed(1234)
x <- rnorm(120)
d <-.07
y <- cumsum(x+d)*-1
Since we have not declared the data as time series, plotting it with the plot command would not return the intended labels for the x-axis. See the code and the chart below.
plot(y, type="l")
Now there should be an option in the plot or the plot.ts command to display the time series specific x-axis. I couldn't find one. So here's the workaround.
Declare the data set to be time series.
Use tsp and seq to generate the required x-axis labels.
Plot the chart but suppress x-axis.
Use the axis command to add the custom x-axis labels.
Add an extra step to draw a vertical line at 2012.
Here's the code.
my.ts <- ts(y, start=c(2007, 1), end=c(2017, 12), frequency=12)
tsp = attributes(my.ts)$tsp
dates = seq(as.Date("2007-01-01"), by = "month", along = my.ts)
plot(my.ts, xaxt = "n", main= "Plotting outcome over time",
ylab="outcome", xlab="time")
axis(1, at = seq(tsp[1], tsp[2], along = my.ts), labels = format(dates, "%Y-%m"))
abline(v=2012, col="blue", lty=2, lwd=2)
The result is charted below.
This is a workable solution for most data scientists. But if your audience comprises business students or professionals there are too many lines of code to write.
Question: Is it possible to plot a time series variable (object) using the plot command with the format option controlling how the x-axis will be displayed?
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Answer 1

ggplot2 package has the scale_x_date function for plotting time series in desired scales, labels, breaks and limits (day, month, year formats).
All you need is date class object and values y. For eg.
dates = seq(as.Date("01-01-2007", format = "%d-%m-%Y"), length.out = 120, by = "month")
df <- data.frame(dates, y)
# use the format you need in your plot using scale_x_date
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(df, aes(dates, y)) + geom_line() + scale_x_date(date_labels = "%b-%Y") +
geom_vline(xintercept = as.Date("01-01-2012", format = "%d-%m-%Y"), linetype = 'dotted', color = 'blue')

Answer 2

I think the question boils down to wanting a pre-written function for the custom axis you have in mind. Note that plot(my.ts) does give a plot with ticks every month and labels every year which to me looks better than the plot shown in the question but if you want a custom axis since R is a programming language you can certainly write a simple function for that and from then on it's just a matter of calling that function.
For example, to get you started here is a function that accepts a frequency 12 ts object. It draws an X axis with ticks for each month labelling the years and each every'th month where the every argument can be a divisor of 12. The default is 3 so a label for every third month is shown (except Jan which is shown as the year). len is the number of letters of the month shown and can be 1, 2 or 3. 1 means show Jul as J, 2 means Ju and 3 means Jul. The default is 1.
xaxis12 <- function(ser, every = 3, len = 1) {
tt <- time(ser)
axis(side = 1, at = tt, labels = FALSE)
is.every <- cycle(ser) %in% seq(1, 12, every)[-1]
month.labs <- substr(month.abb[cycle(ser)][is.every], 1, len)
axis(side = 1, at = tt[is.every], labels = month.labs,
cex.axis = 0.7, tcl = -0.75)
is.jan <- cycle(ser) == 1
year.labs <- sprintf("'%02d", as.integer(tt)[is.jan] %% 100)
axis(side = 1, at = tt[is.jan], labels = year.labs,
cex.axis = 0.7, tcl = -1)
}
# test
plot(my.ts, xaxt = "n")
xaxis12(my.ts)

Answer 3

Gabor is spot-on. It really just depends on what you want, and what you are willing to dig up or alter. Here is a simple alternative using a newer and less-well-known package that is excellent for plotting xts types:
## alternative
library(rtsplot) # load the plotting package
library(xts) # load the xts time-series container package
xx <- as.xts(my.ts) # create an xts object
rtsplot(xx, main= "Plotting outcome over time")
rtsplot.x.highlight(xx, which(index(xx)=="Jan 2012"), 1)
As you can see, the plotting then is two calls -- rtsplot has lots of nice defaults. Below is a screenshot as I am lazy, the plot window does of course not have a title bar...