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handling dates in R

2 messages · Pijus Virketis, Don MacQueen

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Dear all,

I am just getting into R, and I arrive with a task in hand. I need to handle time series of price data, and use them in regressions and cluster models of various kinds. At this time, I am just trying to learn the most graceful ways of working with date-indexed data in R in general. 

I know of the ts object; however, it seems to assume a very regular periodicity of the data. Unfortunately, price data is usually available not for 7 days a week but for 5, and with omissions for trading holidays, etc. 

What is the best way to represent this in a ts object? Also, other languages I have worked with have libraries to do things such as date comparison, to derive the day of the week from a date, etc. Does R have such a facility? Or should I farm a task like that to an external tool, such as Python or Perl?

Thanks!

Pijus

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At 10:47 AM -0500 8/28/02, Pijus Virketis wrote:
R includes functions for handling dates as you describe. Start with 
the help page for the ISOdatetime function:
   ?ISOdatetime
and that should lead you to additional information. Such as
   ?DateTimeClasses

Also, at http://www.R-project.org/, click on the "Newsletter" link. 
One of the newsletter has a discussion on the topic (sorry, I don't 
remember which one).
-Don