Business Dates and Holidays
Discover how to work effectively with business dates and holidays in time series data.
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Introduction
When learning about time series data, it’s crucial to understand how to handle business days. So far, we’ve been focusing on calendar days when working with time series data.
On the other hand, a business day refers only to days when businesses are typically operating. This usually includes weekdays (Monday through Friday) and excludes weekends and public holidays. Business days are important for various purposes, such as calculating deadlines and processing shipping times.
Generating business date ranges
There are two ways to generate business dates. The most direct way is to use the bdate_range() function, which returns a fixed frequency DatetimeIndex with the business day as the default frequency (i.e., string alias B).
For example, we can generate a set of business dates for the first 13 weeks (representing the first quarter) of the financial year of 2023, as shown below:
# Generate business dates for first quarter of financial year 2023bdates_q1 = pd.bdate_range(start='2023-01-01',periods=13*5, # 13 weeks of 5 business working days)print(bdates_q1)
Note: The start and end dates of
bdate_range()are strictly inclusive, therefore dates that fall outside of these dates won’t be generated.
In the example above, notice that we’ve set the periods to be 13 weeks of five business days instead of the typical seven calendar days because we only want to include weekdays in the date range.
Beyond the default frequency of B, we can modify the freq parameter to generate days based on other logic, such as quarters, weeks, and other periods common in business situations. For instance, we can obtain the range of dates at the start of each business quarter:
# Generate business dates at business quarter start frequencybdates_bqs = pd.bdate_range(start='2023-01-01',freq='BQS', # Business quarter startperiods=8, # 8 business quarters)print(bdates_bqs)
The code above generates eight business-quarter dates, therefore the output essentially ...