Why is the time series data being plotted backwards in R? - r

Question

I am stuck on the why that this is happening and have tried searching everywhere for the answer. When I try to plot a timeseries object in R the resulting plot comes out in reverse.
I have the following code:
library(sqldf)
stock_prices <- read.csv('~/stockPrediction/input/REN.csv')
colnames(stock_prices) <- tolower(colnames(stock_prices))
colnames(stock_prices)[7] <- 'adjusted_close'
stock_prices <- sqldf('SELECT date, adjusted_close FROM stock_prices')
head(stock_prices)
date adjusted_close
1 2014-10-20 3.65
2 2014-10-17 3.75
3 2014-10-16 4.38
4 2014-10-15 3.86
5 2014-10-14 3.73
6 2014-10-13 4.09
tail(stock_prices)
date adjusted_close
1767 2007-10-15 8.99
1768 2007-10-12 9.01
1769 2007-10-11 9.02
1770 2007-10-10 9.06
1771 2007-10-09 9.06
1772 2007-10-08 9.08
But when I try the following code:
stock_prices_ts <- ts(stock_prices$adjusted_close, start=c(2007, 1), end=c(2014, 10), frequency=12)
plot(stock_prices_ts, col='blue', lwd=2, type='l')
How the image that results is :
And even if I reverse the time series object with this code:
plot(rev(stock_prices_ts), col='blue', lwd=2, type='l')
I get this
which has arbitrary numbers.
Any idea why this is happening? Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

This is happened because your object loose its time serie structure once you apply rev function.
For example :
set.seed(1)
gnp <- ts(cumsum(1 + round(rnorm(100), 2)),
start = c(1954, 7), frequency = 12)
gnp ## gnp has a real time serie structure
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
1954 0.37 1.55 1.71 4.31 5.64 5.82
1955 7.31 9.05 10.63 11.32 13.83 15.22 15.60 14.39 16.51 17.47 18.45 20.39
1956 22.21 23.80 25.72 27.50 28.57 27.58 29.20 30.14 30.98 30.51 31.03 32.45
1957
rev(gnp) ## the reversal is just a vector
[1] 110.91 110.38 110.60 110.17 110.45 108.89 106.30 104.60 102.44 ....
In general is a liitle bit painful to manipulate the class ts. One idea is to use an xts object that "generally" conserve its structure one you apply common operation on it.
Even in this case the generic method rev is not implemented fo an xts object, it is easy to coerce the resulted zoo time series to and xts one using as.xts.
par(mfrow=c(2,2))
plot(gnp,col='red',main='gnp')
plot(rev(gnp),type='l',col='red',main='rev(gnp)')
library(xts)
xts_gnp <- as.xts(gnp)
plot(xts_gnp)
## note here that I apply as.xts again after rev operation
## otherwise i lose xts structure
rev_xts_gnp = as.xts(rev(as.xts(gnp)))
plot(rev_xts_gnp)