Suppose I have a dataframe that looks like the following: n=2 mydata <- data.frame(exp = rep(1:5,each=n), rslt = c(12,15,7,8,24,28,33,15,22,11)) mydata exp rslt 1 1 12 2 1 15 3 2 7 4 2 8 5 3 24 6 3 28 7 4 33 8 4 15 9 5 22 10 5 11
The variable 'exp' (for experiment') occurs in pairs over consecutive rows -- 1,1, then 2,2, then 3,3, and so on. The first row in a pair is the 'control', and the second is a 'treatment'. The rslt column is the result. What I'm trying to do is create a subset of this dataframe that consists of the exp number, and the lagged difference between the 'control' and 'treatment' result. So, for exp=1, the difference is (15-12)=3. For exp=2, the difference is (8-7)=1, and so on. What I'm hoping to do is take mydata (above), and turn it into exp diff 1 1 3 2 2 1 3 3 4 4 4 -18 5 5 -11 The basic 'trick' I can't figure out is how to create a lagged variable between the second row (record) for a given level of exp, and the first row for that exp. This is easy to do in SAS (which I'm more familiar with), but I'm struggling with the equivalent in R. The brute force approach I thought of is to simply split the dataframe into to (one even rows, one odd rows), merge by exp, and then calculate a difference. But this seems to require renaming the rslt column in the two new dataframes so they are different in the merge (say, rslt_cont n the odd dataframe, and rslt_trt in the even dataframe), allowing me to calculate a difference between the two. While I suppose this would work, I'm wondering if I'm missing a more elegant 'in place' approach that doesn't require me to split the data frame and do every via a merge. Suggestions/pointers to the obvious welcome. I've tried playing with lag, and some approaches using lag in the zoo package, but haven't found the magic trick. The problem (meaning, what I can't figure out) seems to be conditioning the lag on the level of exp. Many thanks... mydata <-*data.frame*(x = c(20,35,45,55,70), n = rep(50,5), y = c(6,17,26,37,44)) [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.