Timevar Date for googleVis MotionChart R

Question

Data set i am using is shown below. It is a csv file.

 Date            Subject       val1       val2       val3
    2010-05-01        12         -0.6155     0.5083     2.6286
    2010-06-03        13          0.96416    0.785      1.41
    2010-07-01        14          0.9578     1.258      0.579
    2010-08-01        15          1.249      1.879      0.268

I am trying to visualize the data be gvisMotionchart.

My code is:-

test_motionchart<-read.csv("data.csv")
test_motion=gvisMotionChart(test_motionchart,idvar="Subject",timevar="Date")

After executing this code i get error message which says

Error in testTimevar(x[[options$data$timevar]], options$data$date.format) : 
  The timevar has to be of numeric or Date format. Currently it is  factor

Any help to get out of this.

Thanks in advance

thelatemail · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-05T02:57:14.953

2

The error tells you exactly what is wrong:

test <- read.table(text="Date            Subject       val1       val2       val3
    2010-05-01        12         -0.6155     0.5083     2.6286
    2010-06-03        13          0.96416    0.785      1.41
    2010-07-01        14          0.9578     1.258      0.579
    2010-08-01        15          1.249      1.879      0.268",header=TRUE)

> str(test$Date)
 Factor w/ 4 levels "2010-05-01","2010-06-03",..: 1 2 3 4

See the Factor w/ 4 levels? You need a Date instead.

Try:

test$Date <- as.Date(test$Date)

Now:

> str(test$Date)
 Date[1:4], format: "2010-05-01" "2010-06-03" "2010-07-01" "2010-08-01"

Alternatively you can specify you want a Date output for the specific variable when reading in the csv using the colClasses option:

test <- read.csv(
filename.csv,
header=TRUE,
colClasses=c(Date="Date")
)

edited Jul 05 '13 at 02:57

answered Jul 05 '13 at 02:29

thelatemail

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when i tried this test$Date <- as.Date(test$Date) it throws error saying Error in as.Date.default(test$Date) : do not know how to convert 'test$Date' to class “Date” – stackoverflowuser Jul 05 '13 at 02:44
@NirojKarki - well, I did use your example data exactly as posted, so it should work. Can you give the results of `dput(test$Date)` to make sure there is nothing funny going on? – thelatemail Jul 05 '13 at 02:50
result of dput(test$Date) is :- structure(list(test_$Date = structure(c1L, 1L, 1L, 1L,.......,1L,2L,2L,2L,.......2L,, .Label = c("2012-11-01", "2012-11-02", "2012-11-03", "2012-11-04", "2012-11-05", "2012-11-06", "2012-11-07", "2012-11-08", "2012-11-09", "2012-11-10", "2012-11-11", "2012-11-12", "2012-11-13", "2012-11-14", "2012-11-15", "2012-11-16", "2012-11-18", "2012-11-20", "2012-11-21", "2012-11-22", "2012-11-23", "2012-11-24", "2012-11-25", "2012-11-29"), class = "factor")), .Names = "test$Date", row.names = c(NA, -480L), class = "data.frame") – – stackoverflowuser Jul 05 '13 at 16:07
That is a very malformed column entry for `test$Date`. It should be a factor but it is a dataframe. The OP should retrace the production of the `test` data.frame and remove whatever typo created `test_$Date` – IRTFM Jul 05 '13 at 16:44

Timevar Date for googleVis MotionChart R

1 Answers1