Systems and methods are provided for analyzing unstructured time stamped data of a physical process in order to generate structured hierarchical data for a hierarchical time series analysis application. A plurality of time series analysis functions are selected from a functions repository. Distributions of time stamped unstructured data are analyzed to identify a plurality of potential hierarchical structures for the unstructured data with respect to the selected time series analysis functions. Different recommendations for the potential hierarchical structures for each of the selected time series analysis functions are provided, where the selected time series analysis functions affect what types of recommendations are to be provided, and the unstructured data is structured into a hierarchical structure according to one or more of the recommended hierarchical structures, where the structured hierarchical data is provided to an application for analysis using one or more of the selected time series analysis functions.