zoo: an S3 class and methods for indexed totally ordered observations

zoo is an R package providing an S3 class with methods for indexed totally ordered observations, such as irregular time series. Its key design goals are independence of a particular index/time/date class and consistency with base R and the "ts" class for regular time series. This paper describes how these are achieved within zoo and provides several illustrations of the available methods for "zoo" objects which include plotting, merging and binding, several mathematical operations, extracting and replacing data and index, coercion and NA handling. A subclass "zooreg" embeds regular time series into the "zoo" framework and thus bridges the gap between regular and irregular time series classes in R.