R lag irregular time series data

Question

Consider an irregular time series data frame with time and value columns.
I want to add another column where values are lead by delay seconds.

So, if we consider the second column to be value_2, then value_2 at time t must be equal to value at time t + delay or right after that.

ts=data.frame(
  time=c(1,2,3,5,8,10,11,15,20,23),
  value=c(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10)
)

ts_with_delayed_value <- add_delayed_value(ts, "value", 2, "time")

> ts_with_delayed_value
   time value value_2
1     1     1       3
2     2     2       4
3     3     3       4
4     5     4       5
5     8     5       6
6    10     6       8
7    11     7       8
8    15     8       9
9    20     9      10
10   23    10      10

I have my own version of this function add_delayed_value, here it is:

add_delayed_value <- function(data, colname, delay, colname_time) {
  colname_delayed <- paste(colname, sprintf("%d", delay), sep="_")
  data[colname_delayed] <- NaN

  for (i in 1:nrow(data)) {
    time_delayed <- data[i, colname_time] + delay
    value_delayed <- data[data[colname_time] >= time_delayed, colname][1]
    if (is.na(value_delayed)) {
      value_delayed <- data[i, colname]
    }
    data[i, colname_delayed] <- value_delayed
  }

  return(data)
}

Is there a way to vectorize this routine to avoid the slow loop?

I'm quite new to R, so this code probably has lots of issues. What can be improved about it?

Answer 1

You could try using:

library(dplyr)
library(zoo)
na.locf(ts$value[sapply(ts$time, function(x) min(which(ts$time - x >=2 )))])
[1]  3  4  4  5  6  8  8  9 10 10