R custom data.table function with multiple variable inputs

Question

I am writing a custom aggregation function with data.table (v 1.9.6) and struggle to pass function arguments to it. there have been similar questions on this but none deals

Answer 1

Here's an option using mget, as commented:

fn_agg <- function(DT, var_list, var_name_list, by_var_list, order_var_list) {

  temp <- DT[, setNames(lapply(.SD, sum, na.rm = TRUE), var_name_list), 
             by = by_var_list, .SDcols = var_list]

  setorderv(temp, order_var_list)

  cols1 <- paste0(var_name_list, "_del")
  cols2 <- paste0(cols1, "_rel")

  temp[, (cols1) := lapply(mget(var_name_list), function(x) {
    x - shift(x, n = 1, type = "lag")
  })]

  temp[, (cols2) := lapply(mget(var_name_list), function(x) {
    xshift <- shift(x, n = 1, type = "lag")
    (x - xshift) / xshift
  })]

  temp[]
}

fn_agg(dt, 
       var_list = c("x", "y"), 
       var_name_list = c("x_sum", "y_sum"), 
       by_var_list = c("a", "b"), 
       order_var_list = c("a", "b"))

#   a b x_sum y_sum x_sum_del y_sum_del x_sum_del_rel y_sum_del_rel
#1: a e   254   358        NA        NA            NA            NA
#2: b f   246   116        -8      -242  -0.031496063    -0.6759777
#3: c g   272   242        26       126   0.105691057     1.0862069
#4: d h   273   194         1       -48   0.003676471    -0.1983471

Instead of mget, you could also make use of data.table's .SDcols argument as in

temp[, (cols1) := lapply(.SD, function(x) {
    x - shift(x, n = 1, type = "lag")
  }), .SDcols = var_name_list]

Also, there are probably ways to improve the function by avoiding duplicated computation of shift(x, n = 1, type = "lag") but I only wanted to demonstrate a way to use data.table in functions.