Calendar-based graphics for visualizing people's daily schedules

Calendars are broadly used in society to display temporal information, and events. This paper describes a new R package with functionality to organize and display temporal data, collected on sub-daily resolution, into a calendar layout. The function frame_calendar uses linear algebra on the date variable to restructure data into a format lending itself to calendar layouts. The user can apply the grammar of graphics to create plots inside each calendar cell, and thus the displays synchronize neatly with ggplot2 graphics. The motivating application is studying pedestrian behavior in Melbourne, Australia, based on counts which are captured at hourly intervals by sensors scattered around the city. Faceting by the usual features such as day and month, was insufficient to examine the behavior. Making displays on a monthly calendar format helps to understand pedestrian patterns relative to events such as work days, weekends, holidays, and special events. The layout algorithm has several format options and variations. It is implemented in the R package sugrrants.