time series time series data is an important form of structured data in many different fieldssuch as financeeconomicsecologyneuroscienceor physics anything that is observed or measured at many points in time forms time series many time series are fixed frequencywhich is to say that data points occur at regular intervals according to some rulesuch as every secondsevery minutesor once per month time series can also be irregular without fixed unit or time or offset between units how you mark and refer to time series data depends on the application and you may have one of the followingtimestampsspecific instants in time fixed periodssuch as the month january or the full year intervals of timeindicated by start and end timestamp periods can be thought of as special cases of intervals experiment or elapsed timeeach timestamp is measure of time relative to particular start time for examplethe diameter of cookie baking each second since being placed in the oven in this am mainly concerned with time series in the first categoriesthough many of the techniques can be applied to experimental time series where the index may be an integer or floating point number indicating elapsed time from the start of the experiment the simplest and most widely used kind of time series are those indexed by timestamp pandas provides standard set of time series tools and data algorithms with thisyou can efficiently work with very large time series and easily slice and diceaggregateand resample irregular and fixed frequency time series as you might guessmany of these tools are especially useful for financial and economics applicationsbut you could certainly use them to analyze server log datatoo www it-ebooks info