ggtime

The ggtime package extends the capabilities of ‘ggplot2’ by providing grammatical elements and plot helpers designed for visualizing time series patterns. These functions use calendar structures implemented in the mixtime package to help explore common time series patterns including trend, seasonality, cycles, and holidays.

The plot helper functions make use of the tsibble data format in order to quickly and easily produce common time series plots. These plots can also be constructed with the underlying grammar elements, which allows greater flexibility in producing custom time series visualisations.

Installation

You can install the stable version from CRAN:

install.packages("ggtime")

You can install the development version of ggtime from GitHub with:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("mitchelloharawild/ggtime")

Examples

The simplest time series visualisation is the time plot, which shows time continuously on the x-axis with the measured variables on the y-axis. A time plot is useful for identifying patterns that persist over a long period of time, such as trends and seasonality. A time plot can be created from a tsibble with the autoplot() helper function.

library(ggtime)
library(ggplot2)
library(tsibble)

tsibbledata::aus_production |>
  autoplot(Beer)

A time plot can also be constructed with the underlying grammar elements, which allows greater flexibility in the style and appearance of the plot. The geom_time_line() element is a time-aware extension of ggplot2::geom_line() that ensures line slopes accurately represent rates of change even over timezone changes, gaps, and duplicated time points.

tsibbledata::aus_production |>
  ggplot(aes(x = Quarter, y = Beer)) +
  geom_time_line(colour = "steelblue")

To view the shape of the annual seasonal pattern, it is useful to use a seasonal plot which shows time cyclically on the x-axis. This makes it easier to identify the peaks, troughs, and overall shape of the seasonality. A seasonal plot is created from a tsibble with the gg_season() plot helper function.

tsibbledata::aus_production |>
  gg_season(Beer)