Create Forecast and Check Accuracy - r

Question

I have data of the form SaleDateTime = '2015-01-02 23:00:00.000' SaleCount=4.
I'm trying to create an hourly forecast for the next 12 hours, using the code below.
I'm new to forecasting and could definitely appreciate some advice.
I'm trying to partition the data, train a model, plot the forecast with x axis of the form '2015-01-02 23:00:00.000', and test the accuracy of the model on a test time series.
I'm getting the error message below, when I try to run the accuracy as shown. Does anyone know why I'm getting the error message below?
When I run the plot as shown below it has an x axis from 0 to 400, does anyone know how to show that as something like '2015-01-02 23:00:00.000'? I would also like to narrow the plot to the last say 3 months.
My understanding is that if you don't specify a model for forecast, then it tries to fit the best model it can to the data for the forecast. Is that correct?
How do I filter for the same timeseries range with the forecast as the ts1Test that I'm trying to run accuracy on, is it something like ts(fcast2, start=2001, end = 8567) ?
Since I'm using the zoo package is the as.POSIXct step unnecessary, could I just do eventdata <- zoo(Value, order.by = SaleDateTime) instead?
library("forecast")
library("zoo")
SampleData<-SampleData
Value<-SampleData[,c("SaleDateTime","SaleCount")]
rDateTime<-as.POSIXct(SampleData$SaleDateTime, format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
eventdata <- zoo(Value, order.by = rDateTime)
##Partitioning data Training/Testing
ts1SampleTrain<-eventdata[1:2000,]
ts1Train<-ts(ts1SampleTrain$SaleCount, frequency=24)
ts1SampleTest<-eventdata[2001:28567,]
ts1Test<-ts(ts1SampleTest$SaleCount, frequency=24)
#Training Model
fcast2<-forecast(ts1Train,h=8567)
plot(fcast2)
accuracy(fcast2,ts1Test)
New Error:
Error in -.default(xx, ff[1:n]) : non-numeric argument to binary operator

Answer 1

To make your accuracy test run you should ensure that the length of your test data ts1Test and your forecasting horizon, h in fcast2<-forecast(ts1Train,h=8567) are of the same length. Now you have 26567 datapoints vs 8567.
Following your approach, the next toy example will work:
library(forecast)
library(zoo)
Value <- rnorm(1100)
rDateTime <- seq(as.POSIXct('2012-01-01 00:00:00'), along.with=Value, by='hour')
eventDate <- ts(zoo(Value, order.by=rDateTime), frequency = 24)
tsTrain <-eventDate[1:1000]
tsTest <- eventDate[1001:1100]
fcast<-forecast(tsTrain,h=100)
accuracy(fcast, tsTest)
ME RMSE MAE MPE MAPE MASE ACF1
Training set -2.821378e-04 9.932745e-01 7.990188e-01 1.003861e+02 1.007542e+02 7.230356e-01 4.638487e-02
Test set 0.02515008 1.02271839 0.86072703 99.79208174 100.14023919 NA NA
Concerning your other two questions:
Use of POSIX timestamps and zoo package. You don't need them to
use forecast. ts(Value, frequency) would suffice.
Plotting time series object with datetimes as your labels. The
following code snippet should get you started in this direction. Look for
axis function that provides the desired behavior:
par(mar=c(6,2,1,1)) # bottom, left, top, right margins
plot(tsTrain, type="l", xlab="", xaxt="n")
axis(side=1, at=seq(1,1000,100), label=format(rDateTime[seq(1,1000,100)], "%Y-%m-%d"), las=2)