Role of frequency parameter in ts

Question

How does the ts() function use its frequency parameter? What is the effect of assigning wrong values as frequency?

I am trying to use 1.5 years of website usage data to build a time series model so that I can forecast the usage for coming periods. I am using data at daily level. What should be the frequency here - 7 or 365 or 365.25?

Answer 1

The frequency is "the" period at which seasonal cycles repeat. I use "the" in scare quotes since, of course, there are often multiple cycles in time series data. For instance, daily data often exhibit weekly patterns (a frequency of 7) and yearly patterns (a frequency of 365 or 365.25 - the difference often does not matter).

In your case, I would assume that weekly patterns dominate, so I would assign frequency=7. If your data exhibits additional patterns, e.g., holiday effects, you can use specialized methods accounting for multiple seasonalities, or work with dummy coding and a regression-based framework.