Arithmetic Operations with Timedelta and DateOffset

Introduction

Part of working with time series data is applying math operations to it. Therefore, it’s important for us to understand the pandas capabilities that allow for precise and flexible date-time arithmetics. In particular, we’ll recap the Timedelta class before diving into DateOffset objects.

Basic operations with Timedelta

As a recap, the Timedelta class in pandas represents a difference between two dates or times, expressed in standard date time units (e.g., days, hours, and minutes), and can be positive or negative. The Timedelta is a powerful tool for working with time series data, because it allows us to perform arithmetic operations with time-based data. These arithmetic operations include adding or subtracting time intervals and calculating differences between dates.

Suppose we’re working with a DatetimeIndex with seconds precision, as illustrated below: