Time Series Histogram Generation in R Studio

Recently I have started learning R because of the powerful number of tools that are part of the R eco-system for data analysis.

Previously, doing a histogram of a time-series was a painstaking process.

I'm happy to announce that today, I have discovered the power of the hist function for time data as POSIXlt class data.

Here is the basic code:

# Read the data in
Data <- read.csv("~/MyDataSource.csv", header=FALSE)
# Convert the timestamps from the csv file into POSIXlt date time structure
Data$V1 <- as.POSIXlt(Data$V1, format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
# Display the histogram
hist(Data$V1, breaks="hour", xlab="Date / Time")

This assumes that the first column contains date and time data formatted like: 2016-02-05 09:04:24.967 while reading the dates in from the default timezone of the system.


Thanks R Studio for making my life easier!