Can you Create a Space Time Cube with irregular time intervals?

[Alec]

 I am trying to make a Space Time Cube from a Multidimensional Raster Layer,  and have followed  this ESRI tutorial to a t. (https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-pro/analytics/explore-your-raster-data-with-space-t...) I keep getting the error "110300: The Input Multidimensional Raster Layer contains irregular time intervals. The data could not be binned into regular intervals of <value>". The rasters that make up my Multidimensional raster are, as it says, not at an equal time interval.  When I change their dates to an evenly spaced time interval, the space time cube works... Is there really no way to have a space time cube without having perfectly paced apart data?  Any insight would be awesome. Thanks.

[DanPatterson]

How Create Space Time Cube works—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

You could always propose it as an Idea

[SophiaTheMapper]

Hi Mr. Patterson, 

I have referred to the documentation you shared quite a bit but am still having trouble. One thing i find it lacks is how to set up your attribute table. Do I need a different layer for each collection period and then make different time space cubes ? I would like them all to stack but cannot seem to achieve this. I have station data so my locations are not changing. I cannot seem to get the time space cube to stack when looking at it in 2D map space. but would prefer this visualization. My client does not like the stretched appearance that occurs in ArcScene. I have tried the following...1. appending my location data so that i have 10 points stacked on top of each other (attribute table has one location column with the geometries repeated each time a collection occurs- this is the only way i have been able to get the cube to stack but only in ArcScene). 2. using a related table with a one to many relationship.this did not work. 

i can get one slice of time to show up at my locations but nothing more when in the 2D map space. Can you please offer advice on how to set up the attribute table for station data? Also, is it possible to be able to view the time space cube stacked in the 2d map frame? please see picture attached- there is only one cube but i would like there to be one for each six month time period (8)...@LynneBuie 

[LynneBuie · Accepted solution]

Hi @Alec ,

Glad to hear my blog article is helping you out, but sorry you are having trouble with the time intervals. Yes, it is a requirement of the space-time cube that the data has equal intervals. The space-time cube is used with statistical tools in the Space Time Pattern Mining toolbox. These statistical methods, such as those used in Emerging Hot Spot Analysis or the Time Series Forecasting toolset are based on the assumption that each time bin has equal intervals. hence if the intervals are not equal, the results may be incorrect. 

Hope this helps!

Lynne 

[Alec]

@LynneBuie Thank you for the response, it definitely answers my question ! And thanks for the thorough blog post as well.