R package distantia

Description

The R package distantia, available on CRAN, offers an efficient, feature-rich toolkit for managing, comparing, and analyzing time series data. It is designed to handle a wide range of scenarios, including:

• Multivariate and univariate time series.
• Regular and irregular sampling.
• Time series of different lengths.

Key Features

Comprehensive Analytical Tools

• 10 distance metrics: see distantia::distances.
• The normalized dissimilarity metric psi.
• Free and Restricted Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) for shape-based comparison.
• A Lock-Step method for sample-to-sample comparison
• Restricted permutation tests for robust inferential support.
• Analysis of contribution to dissimilarity of individual variables in multivariate time series.
• Hierarchical and K-means clustering of time series based on dissimilarity matrices.

Computational Efficiency

• A C++ back-end powered by Rcpp.
• Parallel processing managed through the future package.
• Efficient data handling via zoo.

Time Series Management Tools

• Introduces time series lists (TSL), a versatile format for handling collections of time series stored as lists of zoo objects.
• Includes a suite of tsl_...() functions for generating, resampling, transforming, analyzing, and visualizing univariate and multivariate time series.

Citation

If you find this package useful, please cite it as:

Blas M. Benito, H. John B. Birks (2020). distantia: an open-source toolset to quantify dissimilarity between multivariate ecological time-series. Ecography, 43(5), 660-667. doi: 10.1111/ecog.04895.

Blas M. Benito (2024). distantia: A Toolset for Time Series Dissimilarity Analysis. R package version 2.0.0. url: https://blasbenito.github.io/distantia/.