Making irregular data regular

Importing and Managing Financial Data in R

Joshua Ulrich

Quantitative Analyst & quantmod Co-Author and Maintainer

Regular date-time sequences

Time observations are same distance apart
Create regular date-time sequences using seq() methods:
- seq.Date()
- seq.POSIXt() (POSIXct and POSIXlt)

from_date <- as.Date("2017-01-01")
to_date <- as.Date("2017-01-03")
date_seq <- seq(from = from_date, to = to_date, by = "day")

start() first index value
end() last index value

regular_xts <- xts(seq_along(date_seq), order.by = date_seq)
start(regular_xts)

"2017-01-01"

end(regular_xts)

"2017-01-03"

seq(from = start(regular_xts), to = end(regular_xts), by = "day")

"2017-01-01" "2017-01-02" "2017-01-03"

Zero-width xts objects

xts object with an index, no data

zero_width_xts <- xts(, order.by = date_seq)
zero_width_xts

Data:
numeric(0)
Index:
 Date[1:3], format: "2017-01-01" "2017-01-02" "2017-01-03"

str(zero_width_xts)

An 'xts' object of zero-width

Creating regular from irregular data

Add observation at each date-time in regular sequence
NA in the result

Merge irregular xts with regular zero-width xts

irregular

           Price
2017-01-02 20.01
2017-01-04 20.02
2017-01-10 20.05

date_seq <- seq(from = start(irregular),
                to = end(irregular),
                by = "day")

regular_xts <- xts(, date_seq)

Merge irregular xts with regular zero-width xts

merge(irregular, regular_xts)

           Price
2017-01-02 20.01
2017-01-03    NA
2017-01-04 20.02
2017-01-05    NA
2017-01-06    NA
2017-01-07    NA
2017-01-08    NA
2017-01-09    NA
2017-01-10 20.05

Filling missing values

merged_xts <- merge(irregular, regular_xts)

na.locf(merged_xts)

           Price
2017-01-02 20.01
2017-01-03 20.01
2017-01-04 20.02
2017-01-05 20.02
2017-01-06 20.02
2017-01-07 20.02
2017-01-08 20.02
2017-01-09 20.02
2017-01-10 20.05

Filling missing values

merge(irregular, regular_xts, fill = na.locf)

           Price
2017-01-02 20.01
2017-01-03 20.01
2017-01-04 20.02
2017-01-05 20.02
2017-01-06 20.02
2017-01-07 20.02
2017-01-08 20.02
2017-01-09 20.02
2017-01-10 20.05

Let's practice!

Importing and Managing Financial Data in R