ggtime: Visualizing time with a grammar of temporal graphics

Music City Center 

Effective use of statistical graphics in exploratory time series analysis helps to uncover temporal patterns needed to accurately specify models. While several commonly used plots exist for visualizing time series, little work has been done to formalize them into a unified grammar of temporal graphics. Decomposing traditional time series graphics such as time plots and seasonal plots into modular grammatical elements provides the flexibility needed to clearly visualize multiple seasonality, cycles, and other complex patterns.

Temporal data visualization requires special handling to highlight patterns shaped by calendar systems, much like the nuances of spatial, graph, and uncertainty visualization. The proposed grammar incorporates calendrical concepts to visually align time points at different granularities and timezones, warp time to standardize irregular cyclical durations, and wrap time into hierarchical calendar layouts. In this talk, I will introduce the grammar of temporal graphics as implemented in the ggtime R package, and demonstrate how these grammatical elements can be combined to create both familiar and novel visualizations of complex time series patterns.