Z's Ordered Observations

Description

zoo is the creator for an S3 class of indexed totally ordered observations which includes irregular time series.

Usage

zoo(x, order.by = index(x), frequency = NULL)
## S3 method for class 'zoo':
print(x, style = , quote = FALSE, ...) 

Arguments

Details

zoo provides infrastructure for ordered observations which are stored internally in a vector or matrix with an index attribute (of arbitrary class, see below). The index must have the same length as NROW(x) except in the case of a zero length numeric vector in which case the index length can be any length. Emphasis has been given to make all methods independent of the index/time class (given in order.by). In principle, the data x could also be arbitrary, but currently there is only support for vectors and matrices and partial support for factors.

zoo is particularly aimed at irregular time series of numeric vectors/matrices, but it also supports regular time series (i.e., series with a certain frequency). zoo's key design goals are independence of a particular index/date/time class and consistency with ts and base R by providing methods to standard generics. Therefore, standard functions can be used to work with "zoo" objects and memorization of new commands is reduced.

When creating a "zoo" object with the function zoo, the vector of indexes order.by can be of (a single) arbitrary class (if x is shorter or longer than order.by it is expanded accordingly), but it is essential that ORDER(order.by) works. For other functions it is assumed that c(), length(), MATCH() and subsetting [, work. If this is not the case for a particular index/date/time class, then methods for these generic functions should be created by the user. Note, that to achieve this, new generic functions ORDER and MATCH are created in the zoo package with default methods corresponding to the non-generic base functions order and match. Furthermore, for certain (but not for all) operations the index class should have an as.numeric method (in particular for regular series) and an as.character method might improve printed output (see also below).

If a frequency is specified when creating a series via zoo, the object returned is actually of class "zooreg" which inherits from "zoo". This is a subclass of "zoo" which relies on having a "zoo" series with an additional "frequency" attribute (which has to comply with the index of that series). Regular "zooreg" series can also be created by zooreg, the zoo analogue of ts. See the respective help page and is.regular for further details.

Methods to standard generics for "zoo" objects currently include: print (see above), summary, str, head, tail, [ (subsetting), rbind, cbind, merge (see merge.zoo), aggregate (see aggregate.zoo), barplot, plot and lines (see plot.zoo).

To “prettify” printed output of "zoo" series the generic function index2char is used for turning index values into character values. It defaults to using as.character but can be customized if a different printed display should be used (although this should not be necessary, usually).

The subsetting method [ work essentially like the corresponding functions for vectors or matrices respectively, i.e., takes indexes of type "numeric", "integer" or "logical". But additionally, it can be used to index with observations from the index class of the series. If the index class of the series is one of the three classes above, the corresponding index has to be encapsulated in I() to enforce usage of the index class (see examples).

Additionally, zoo provides several generic functions and methods to work (a) on the data contained in a "zoo" object, (b) the index (or time) attribute associated to it, and (c) on both data and index:

(a) The data contained in "zoo" objects can be extracted by coredata (strips off all "zoo"-specific attributes) and modified using coredata<-. Both are new generic functions with methods for "zoo" objects, see coredata.

(b) The index associated with a "zoo" object can be extracted by index and modified by index<-. As the interpretation of the index as “time” in time series applications is more natural, there are also synonymous methods time and time<-. The start and the end of the index/time vector can be queried by start and end. See index.

(c) To work on both data and index/time, zoo provides methods lag, diff (see lag.zoo) and window, window<- (see window.zoo).

In addition to standard group generic function (see Ops), the following mathematical operations are availabe as methods for "zoo" objects: transpose t which coerces to a matrix first, and cumsum, cumprod, cummin, cummax which are applied column wise.

Coercion to and from "zoo" objects is available for objects of various classes, in particular "ts", "irts" and "its" objects can be coerced to "zoo", the reverse is available for "its" and for "irts" (the latter in package tseries). Furthermore, "zoo" objects can be coerced to vectors, matrices and lists and data frames (dropping the index/time attribute). See as.zoo.

Four methods are available for NA handling in the data of "zoo" objects: na.omit which returns a "zoo" object with incomplete observations removed, na.locf which replaces NAs by the last previous non-NA, na.contiguous which extracts the longest consecutive stretch of non-missing values in a "zoo" object and na.approx which uses linear interpolation to fill in NA values.

A typical task to be performed on ordered observations is to evaluate some function, e.g., computing the mean, in a window of observations that is moved over the full sample period. The generic function rapply provides this functionality for arbitrary functions and more efficient versions rollmean, rollmax, rollmedian are available for the mean, maximum and median respectively.

Value

A vector or matrix with an "index" attribute of the same dimension (NROW(x)) by which x is ordered.

See Also

zooreg, plot.zoo, index, merge.zoo

Examples

## simple creation and plotting
x.Date <- as.Date("2003-02-01") + c(1, 3, 7, 9, 14) - 1
x <- zoo(rnorm(5), x.Date)
plot(x)
time(x)

## subsetting with numeric indexes
x[c(2, 4)]
## subsetting with index class
x[as.Date("2003-02-01") + c(2, 8)]

## different classes of indexes/times can be used, e.g. numeric vector
x <- zoo(rnorm(5), c(1, 3, 7, 9, 14))
## subsetting with numeric indexes then uses observation numbers
x[c(2, 4)]
## subsetting with index class can be enforced by I()
x[I(c(3, 9))]

## visualization
plot(x)
## or POSIXct
y.POSIXct <- ISOdatetime(2003, 02, c(1, 3, 7, 9, 14), 0, 0, 0)
y <- zoo(rnorm(5), y.POSIXct)
plot(y)

## create a constant series
z <- zoo(1, seq(4)[-2])

## create a 0 dimensional zoo series
z0 <- zoo(, 1:4)

## create a 2 dimensional zoo series
z2 <- zoo(matrix(1:12, 4, 3), as.Date("2003-01-01") + 0:3)

## create a factor zoo object
fz <- zoo(gl(2,5), as.Date("2004-01-01") + 0:9)

## create a zoo series with 0 columns
z20 <- zoo(matrix(nrow = 4, ncol = 0), 1:4)

## arithmetic on zoo ojbects intersects them first
x1 <- zoo(1:5, 1:5)
x2 <- zoo(2:6, 2:6)
10 * x1 + x2

# ifelse does not work with zoo but this works
# to create a zoo object which equals x1 at
# time i if x1[i] > x1[i-1] and 0 otherwise
(diff(x1) > 0) * x1