Advice on defining a data structure in Mathematica
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg44014] Advice on defining a data structure in Mathematica
- From: Mark Coleman <mark at markscoleman.com>
- Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 05:14:45 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Greetings, I'm an econometrician that has used Mathematica for several years. Now I've finally decided to sit down and generalize some of my code to better handle time series data. I'd like to get some opinions on good ways to define a time series "data structure". Ideally this structure would carry all of the important information about the series, e.g, the numercial values, the corresponding dates, the frequency, information for how to convert the series from one frequency to another (say monthly to quarterly), the textual name of the time series (say GDP), and some brief descriptive information. Obviously this could be structured as a list of lists, but that strikes me as not very elegant. I've seen examples of Mathematica code that creates objects that remind me of traditional record data structures using up values. Is this the preferred approach? Thanks, -mark