DZone
Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile
  • Manage Email Subscriptions
  • How to Post to DZone
  • Article Submission Guidelines
Sign Out View Profile
  • Post an Article
  • Manage My Drafts
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.
Log In / Join
Refcards Trend Reports Events Over 2 million developers have joined DZone. Join Today! Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile Manage Email Subscriptions Moderation Admin Console How to Post to DZone Article Submission Guidelines
View Profile
Sign Out
Refcards
Trend Reports
Events
Zones
Culture and Methodologies Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
Partner Zones AWS Cloud
by AWS Developer Relations
Culture and Methodologies
Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering
AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture
Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding
Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance
Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
Partner Zones
AWS Cloud
by AWS Developer Relations
Building Scalable Real-Time Apps with AstraDB and Vaadin
Register Now

Trending

  • How Agile Works at Tesla [Video]
  • Integrating AWS With Salesforce Using Terraform
  • Building the World's Most Resilient To-Do List Application With Node.js, K8s, and Distributed SQL
  • Integration Testing Tutorial: A Comprehensive Guide With Examples And Best Practices

Trending

  • How Agile Works at Tesla [Video]
  • Integrating AWS With Salesforce Using Terraform
  • Building the World's Most Resilient To-Do List Application With Node.js, K8s, and Distributed SQL
  • Integration Testing Tutorial: A Comprehensive Guide With Examples And Best Practices
  1. DZone
  2. Coding
  3. Languages
  4. R: Calculating rolling or moving averages

R: Calculating rolling or moving averages

Mark Needham user avatar by
Mark Needham
·
Sep. 19, 14 · Interview
Like (0)
Save
Tweet
Share
15.12K Views

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

I’ve been playing around with some time series data in R and since there’s a bit of variation between consecutive points I wanted to smooth the data out by calculating the moving average.

I struggled to find an in built function to do this but came across Didier Ruedin’s blog post which described the following function to do the job:

mav <- function(x,n=5){filter(x,rep(1/n,n), sides=2)}

I tried plugging in some numbers to understand how it works:

> mav(c(4,5,4,6), 3)
Time Series:
Start = 1 
End = 4 
Frequency = 1 
[1]       NA 4.333333 5.000000       NA

Here I was trying to do a rolling average which took into account the last 3 numbers so I expected to get just two numbers back – 4.333333 and 5 – and if there were going to be NA values I thought they’d be at the beginning of the sequence.

In fact it turns out this is what the ‘sides’ parameter controls:

sides  
for convolution filters only. If sides = 1 the filter coefficients are for past values only; if sides = 2 they 
are centred around lag 0. In this case the length of the filter should be odd, but if it is even, more of the 
filter is forward in time than backward.

So in our ‘mav’ function the rolling average looks both sides of the current value rather than just at past values. We can tweak that to get the behaviour we want:

mav <- function(x,n=5){filter(x,rep(1/n,n), sides=1)}
> mav(c(4,5,4,6), 3)
Time Series:
Start = 1 
End = 4 
Frequency = 1 
[1]       NA       NA 4.333333 5.000000

The NA values are annoying for any plotting we want to do so let’s get rid of them:

> na.omit(mav(c(4,5,4,6), 3))
Time Series:
Start = 3 
End = 4 
Frequency = 1 
[1] 4.333333 5.000000

Having got to this point I noticed that Didier had referenced the zoo package in the comments and it has a built in function to take care of all this:

> library(zoo)
> rollmean(c(4,5,4,6), 3)
[1] 4.333333 5.000000

I also realised I can list all the functions in a package with the ‘ls’ function so I’ll be scanning zoo’s list of functions next time I need to do something time series related – there’ll probably already be a function for it!

> ls("package:zoo")
  [1] "as.Date"              "as.Date.numeric"      "as.Date.ts"          
  [4] "as.Date.yearmon"      "as.Date.yearqtr"      "as.yearmon"          
  [7] "as.yearmon.default"   "as.yearqtr"           "as.yearqtr.default"  
 [10] "as.zoo"               "as.zoo.default"       "as.zooreg"           
 [13] "as.zooreg.default"    "autoplot.zoo"         "cbind.zoo"           
 [16] "coredata"             "coredata.default"     "coredata<-"          
 [19] "facet_free"           "format.yearqtr"       "fortify.zoo"         
 [22] "frequency<-"          "ifelse.zoo"           "index"               
 [25] "index<-"              "index2char"           "is.regular"          
 [28] "is.zoo"               "make.par.list"        "MATCH"               
 [31] "MATCH.default"        "MATCH.times"          "median.zoo"          
 [34] "merge.zoo"            "na.aggregate"         "na.aggregate.default"
 [37] "na.approx"            "na.approx.default"    "na.fill"             
 [40] "na.fill.default"      "na.locf"              "na.locf.default"     
 [43] "na.spline"            "na.spline.default"    "na.StructTS"         
 [46] "na.trim"              "na.trim.default"      "na.trim.ts"          
 [49] "ORDER"                "ORDER.default"        "panel.lines.its"     
 [52] "panel.lines.tis"      "panel.lines.ts"       "panel.lines.zoo"     
 [55] "panel.plot.custom"    "panel.plot.default"   "panel.points.its"    
 [58] "panel.points.tis"     "panel.points.ts"      "panel.points.zoo"    
 [61] "panel.polygon.its"    "panel.polygon.tis"    "panel.polygon.ts"    
 [64] "panel.polygon.zoo"    "panel.rect.its"       "panel.rect.tis"      
 [67] "panel.rect.ts"        "panel.rect.zoo"       "panel.segments.its"  
 [70] "panel.segments.tis"   "panel.segments.ts"    "panel.segments.zoo"  
 [73] "panel.text.its"       "panel.text.tis"       "panel.text.ts"       
 [76] "panel.text.zoo"       "plot.zoo"             "quantile.zoo"        
 [79] "rbind.zoo"            "read.zoo"             "rev.zoo"             
 [82] "rollapply"            "rollapplyr"           "rollmax"             
 [85] "rollmax.default"      "rollmaxr"             "rollmean"            
 [88] "rollmean.default"     "rollmeanr"            "rollmedian"          
 [91] "rollmedian.default"   "rollmedianr"          "rollsum"             
 [94] "rollsum.default"      "rollsumr"             "scale_x_yearmon"     
 [97] "scale_x_yearqtr"      "scale_y_yearmon"      "scale_y_yearqtr"     
[100] "Sys.yearmon"          "Sys.yearqtr"          "time<-"              
[103] "write.zoo"            "xblocks"              "xblocks.default"     
[106] "xtfrm.zoo"            "yearmon"              "yearmon_trans"       
[109] "yearqtr"              "yearqtr_trans"        "zoo"                 
[112] "zooreg"
R (programming language)

Published at DZone with permission of Mark Needham, DZone MVB. See the original article here.

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Trending

  • How Agile Works at Tesla [Video]
  • Integrating AWS With Salesforce Using Terraform
  • Building the World's Most Resilient To-Do List Application With Node.js, K8s, and Distributed SQL
  • Integration Testing Tutorial: A Comprehensive Guide With Examples And Best Practices

Comments

Partner Resources

X

ABOUT US

  • About DZone
  • Send feedback
  • Careers
  • Sitemap

ADVERTISE

  • Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

  • Article Submission Guidelines
  • Become a Contributor
  • Visit the Writers' Zone

LEGAL

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

CONTACT US

  • 600 Park Offices Drive
  • Suite 300
  • Durham, NC 27709
  • support@dzone.com

Let's be friends: