Equally Spaced and Unequally Spaced Time Series
ETA creates and processes equally spaced and unequally spaced time series.
In the Properties window of the time series can be noted whether the Partitioning of the time axis is equally spaced or unequally spaced.
The make unequally spaced method converts equally spaced time series into unequally spaced time series.
Several methods are available to make time series equally spaced.
The behavior of equally spaced and non-equally spaced time series when deleting, inserting, and editing data points differs.
Equally Spaced Time Series
An equally spaced time series has the same step width throughout. It is equidistant.
If a variable is measured in a fixed time grid with equal time steps, an equally spaced time series results. For example, the electricity demand of a building stored in hourly steps is an equally spaced time series because an hour (as opposed to a month or a year) has a clearly constant length on the time axis (see following figure).
If you delete values of a time series to which the property equidistant is assigned the remaining values move up on the timeline automatically to close the gaps that have arisen so that no empty data points occur.
Unequally Spaced Time Series
An unequally spaced time series, on the other hand, is not divided by equal time steps. It is non-equidistant because it has different step sizes. The following figure illustrates the difference between an equally spaced and an unequally spaced time series. It shows that the time intervals between the measured values or data points of an unequally spaced time series are not constant.
You can change the length of the last sample of an unequally spaced time series.
