An introduction to time series analysis and forecasting

Time series analysis and forecasting are among the most common quantitative techniques employed by businesses and researchers. Largely used in big data, these methods are used to identify trends, clean your data, and to predict the future. This workshop begins by exploring the underlying concepts and components of time series analysis, then moves on to a code demonstration that uses open-sourced police recorded crime statistics to visually explore these components. Participants are invited to work alongside the code demonstration to gain hands-on and practical skills.

This free workshop is suitable for beginner to intermediate users of R. There is no need to know about or have experience with time series analysis but participants will need to already be familiar with the basic functioning of R. For example, participants should already know how to set their working directory, read data into R, save manipulated data under new names, and write the code to run basic descriptive statistics functions.

We will be using Mentimeter to ask questions in this workshop so you may want to have a second device handy for this, such as a smartphone, but it is not essential.

Event Level: Beginner
Prerequisites: Experience of R and RStudio
Target Audience: Researchers/anyone interested in forecasting

Recordings of UK Data Service events are made available on our YouTube channel and, together with the slides, on our past events pages soon after the event has taken place.