calculate the rate of change

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I am trying to calculate the change frequency for a set of data. Each bit of data has the date-time it was created. I would like to say for a specific set of data the change frequency is hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly.

So far I have tried getting the list of dates and get the min/max which is easy to calculate an average from which can be converted into a human readable label such as hourly, daily etc

How would i take into account the age of the last new bit of data. eg: say there were 50 dates all roughly an hour one after the other. This is hourly. but if the last one was 2 weeks ago, its not quite hourly.

I am sure there is a formula to calculate this, but I don't know where to start.

Thanks

P.S. I took a guess at the tags, not sure if there are better ones to use for this question.