The Natural Gas Consumption dataset

In this chapter, and generally throughout this book, we will use the Natural Gas Consumption (NGC) dataset as an example of time series data. This dataset represents the quarterly consumption of natural gas in the US between 2000 and 2018. We will use the Quandl package to load the data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis database (FRED) and store it as a ts object:

library(Quandl)

NGC <-Quandl(code = "FRED/NATURALGAS",
             collapse="quarterly",
             type = "ts",
             end_date = "2018-12-31")

The class of the output can be defined by the type argument, which, in this case, was set to the ts object:

class(NGC)
## [1] "ts"

Typically, when loading a new dataset, it is recommended that you plot the series before moving to the next step in the analysis. This allows you...