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rtimestampbinning

Binning time series in R?

I'm new to R. My data has 600k objects defined by three attributes: Id, Date and TimeOfCall.

TimeofCall has a 00:00:00 format and range from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59.

I want to bin the TimeOfCall attribute, into 24 bins, each one representing hourly slot (first bin 00:00:00 to 00:59:59 and so on).

Can someone talk me through how to do this? I tried using cut() but apparently my format is not numeric. Thanks in advance!

Solution

  • While you could convert to a formal time representation, in this case it might be easier to just use substr:

    test <- c("00:00:01","02:07:01","22:30:15")
as.numeric(substr(test,1,2))
#[1]  0  2 22

    Using a POSIXct time to deal with it would also work, and might be handy if you plan on further calculations (differences in time etc):

    testtime <- as.POSIXct(test,format="%H:%M:%S")
#[1]"2013-12-09 00:00:01 EST" "2013-12-09 02:07:01 EST" "2013-12-09 22:30:15 EST"
as.numeric(format(testtime,"%H"))
#[1]  0  2 22