zlag in plot in R

Question

I'm trying to figure out the idea behind the following command in R

plot(y=hare, x=zlag(hare))

So far as I understand zlag is going to shift the data to the right by 1 time period. How do I interpret this plot?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

In the future, please provide an MWE when posting, including the data source. That said, I figure this is the hare data from the TSA library, i.e.:

library(TSA)

data(hare)
plot(y=hare, x=zlag(hare))

^{Created on 2019-11-29 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

This is a "lag plot", which tells you something about structure/randomness in the time series data. As described e.g. here, non-randomness of the lag plot suggests non-randomness in the underlying data.