Panel data

Elapsed dates

The classes “monthly” and “quarterly” print as dates and are compatible with usual time extraction (ie month, year, etc). Yet, they are stored as integers representing the number of elapsed periods since 1970/01/0 (resp in week, months, quarters). This is particularly handy for simple algebra:

 # elapsed dates
 library(lubridate)
 date <- mdy(c("04/03/1992", "01/04/1992", "03/15/1992"))  
 datem <- as.monthly(date)
 # displays as a period
 datem
 #> [1] "1992m04" "1992m01" "1992m03"
 # behaves as an integer for numerical operations:
 datem + 1
 #> [1] "1992m05" "1992m02" "1992m04"
 # behaves as a date for period extractions:
 year(datem)
 #> [1] 1992 1992 1992

Vector functions

tlag/tlead a vector along a time variable (and NOT with respet to a number of row)

year <- c(1989, 1991, 1992)
value <- c(4.1, 4.5, 3.3)
tlag(value, 1, time = year)
library(lubridate)
date <- mdy(c("01/04/1992", "03/15/1992", "04/03/1992"))
datem <- as.monthly(date)
value <- c(4.1, 4.5, 3.3)
tlag(value, time = datem) 

In constrast to comparable functions in zoo and xts, these functions can be applied to any vector. This allows them to be used within a dplyr chain:

df <- data_frame(
    id    = c(1, 1, 1, 2, 2),
    year  = c(1989, 1991, 1992, 1991, 1992),
    value = c(4.1, 4.5, 3.3, 3.2, 5.2)
)
df %>% group_by(id) %>% mutate(value_l = tlag(value, time = year))

is.panel checks whether a dataset is a panel i.e. the time variable is never missing and the combinations (id, time) are unique.

df <- data_frame(
    id1    = c(1, 1, 1, 2, 2),
    id2   = 1:5,
    year  = c(1991, 1993, NA, 1992, 1992),
    value = c(4.1, 4.5, 3.3, 3.2, 5.2)
)
is.panel(df, id1, year)
df <- df %>% filter(!is.na(year))
is.panel(df, id1, year)
is.panel(df, id1, id2, year)