Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

mixtime (development version)

This is the initial CRAN release of the package with provides the core data types and temporal manipulation for temporal analysis with mixed granularity data.

New features

Time

• The generic mixtime() constructor for creating mixed temporal vectors that combine time points of different granularities (e.g. monthly and quarterly) in a single vector via vecvec.

Linear time

• linear_time() creates linear time vectors with a user-specified chronon (smallest indivisible time unit), supporting both discrete (integer) and continuous (fractional) time models.
• Convenience functions for common temporal granularities: year(), yearquarter(), yearmonth(), yearweek(), date(), and datetime().

Cyclical time

• cyclical_time() creates cyclical time vectors representing positions within a repeating cycle (e.g. day-of-week, month-of-year).
• Convenience functions for common cyclical temporal granularities: month_of_year(), day_of_year(), day_of_month(), day_of_week(), week_of_year(), and time_of_day().

Calendar systems

• Three initial calendar systems:
  • cal_gregorian: standard Gregorian calendar with year, quarter, month, day, hour, minute, second, and millisecond units.
  • cal_isoweek: ISO 8601 week-date calendar with ISO year, week, and day units. Weeks always start on Monday; the first week of the year is the week containing the first Thursday.
  • cal_sym454: Symmetry454 perennial solar calendar with a symmetrical 4–5–4 week pattern per quarter and a leap-week rule.

Sequences

• seq() methods for mixtime and mt_time objects support integer, string (e.g. "1 month"), and time unit by arguments, as well as length.out and along.with. Overflow behaviour when step units differ from sequence units can be controlled with on_invalid = "nearest" (default) or "overflow".

Rounding

• round_time(), floor_time(), and ceiling_time() round time objects to a specified time unit, preserving the input class and timezone.

Formatting

• A mixed-calendar general purpose formatting system is provided for mixtime objects. The format strings use glue-like {} substitutions with the helper functions lin(x) and cyc(x, y) to position linear and cyclical time components in a string. x and y are time units from a calendar, which can be used to create general purpose mixed-calendar time formats.

Timezone support

• tz_name() extracts the timezone from a time object.
• tz_offset() returns the UTC offset for a datetime in its timezone.
• tz_abbreviation() returns the timezone abbreviation (e.g. "EST", "PDT").
• tz_transitions() returns a data frame of DST and other timezone transitions between two time points.

Accessor functions

• time_calendar() extracts the calendar system from a time object.

tsibble and fable compatibility

• Methods for tsibble index validation are provided, enabling mixtime vectors to be used as time indexes in tsibble objects and in forecasting with fable.

Extensibility

• new_calendar() defines a calendar as a named collection of time unit classes, with optional inheritance from another calendar.

• mt_unit(), mt_tz_unit(), and mt_loc_unit() primitives for creating new time units.

• new_linear_time_fn() and new_cyclical_time_fn() are factories for building convenient linear and cyclical time functions (e.g. yearmonth()).

• Calendar arithmetic with:

  • chronon_divmod() performs division-with-remainder arithmetic between time units (e.g. days to months), enabling cross-unit calendrical arithmetic.
  • chronon_cardinality() returns the number of smaller units contained in a larger unit (e.g. days in a month), with context-dependent results for variable-length units.
  • chronon_epoch() returns the epoch offset for a given time unit.

• Displaying time with:

  • time_unit_abbr() and time_unit_full() for time unit text
  • linear_labels() and cyclical_labels() for time labels (e.g. Jan, Feb, … for months of year).
  • chronon_format_linear() and chronon_format_cyclical() for default formatting strings
  • chronon_format_attr() for appending attribute information (e.g. timezones)

Vignettes

• Extending mixtime - a vignette on how to define new calendars and implement calendar arithmetic for temporal operations within the calendar’s units and with other calendars.