Applying a rolling window regression to an XTS series in R

Question

I have an xts of 1033 daily returns points for 5 currency pairs on which I want to run a rolling window regression, but rollapply is not working for my defined function which us

Answer 1

There are several problems here:

• rollapply passes a matrix but lm requires a data.frame.
• rollapply applies the function to each column separately unless we specify by.column=FALSE.
• you may or may not want the result to be right aligned with the dates but if you do use rollapplyr :

1) Incorporating the above we have:

dolm <- function(x) coef(lm(USDZAR ~ ., data = as.data.frame(x))))
rollapplyr(fxr, 62, dolm, by.column = FALSE)

2) An alternative to the lm in the dolm above is to use lm.fit which directly works with matrices and is also faster:

dolm <- function(x) coef(lm.fit(cbind(Intercept = 1, x[,-1]), x[,1]))

Answer 2

New answer

G. Grothendieck's answer is correct but you can do it faster with the rollRegres package as the following example shows (the roll_regres.fit function is ~118 times faster)

# simulate data
set.seed(101)
n <- 1000
wdth = 100
X <- matrix(rnorm(10 * n), n, 10)
y <- drop(X %*% runif(10)) + rnorm(n)
Z <- cbind(y, X)

# assign other function
dolm <- function(x)
  coef(lm.fit(x[, -1], x[, 1]))

# show that they yield the same
library(zoo)
library(rollRegres)
all.equal(
  rollapply(Z, wdth, FUN = dolm,
            by.column = FALSE,  align = "right", fill = NA_real_),
  roll_regres.fit(X, y, wdth)$coefs,
  check.attributes = FALSE)
#R [1] TRUE

# benchmark
library(compiler)
dolm <- cmpfun(dolm)

microbenchmark::microbenchmark(
  newnew = roll_regres.fit(X, y, wdth),
  prev   = rollapply(Z, wdth, FUN = dolm,
                     by.column = FALSE,  align = "right", fill = NA_real_),
  times = 10)
#R Unit: microseconds
#R expr        min         lq       mean     median         uq        max neval
#R newnew    884.938    950.914   1026.134   1025.581   1057.581   1242.075    10
#R   prev 111057.822 111903.649 118867.761 116857.726 122087.160 141362.229    10

You can also use the roll_regres function from the package if you want to use a R formula instead.

Old answer

A third options would be to update the R matrix in a QR decomposition as done in the code below. You can speed this up by doing it in C++ but than you will need the dchud and dchdd subroutines from LINPACK (or another function to update R)

library(SamplerCompare) # for LINPACK `chdd` and `chud`
roll_coef <- function(X, y, width){
  n <- nrow(X)
  p <- ncol(X)
  out <- matrix(NA_real_, n, p)

  is_first <- TRUE
  i <- width 
  while(i <= n){
    if(is_first){
      is_first <- FALSE
      qr. <- qr(X[1:width, ])
      R <- qr.R(qr.)

      # Use X^T for the rest
      X <- t(X)

      XtY <- drop(tcrossprod(y[1:width], X[, 1:width]))
    } else {
      x_new <- X[, i]
      x_old <- X[, i - width]

      # update R 
      R <- .Fortran(
        "dchud", R, p, p, x_new, 0., 0L, 0L, 
        0., 0., numeric(p), numeric(p), 
        PACKAGE = "SamplerCompare")[[1]]

      # downdate R
      R <- .Fortran(
        "dchdd", R, p, p, x_old, 0., 0L, 0L, 
        0., 0., numeric(p), numeric(p), integer(1),
        PACKAGE = "SamplerCompare")[[1]]

      # update XtY
      XtY <- XtY + y[i] * x_new - y[i - width] * x_old
    }

    coef.    <- .Internal(backsolve(R, XtY, p, TRUE, TRUE))
    out[i, ] <- .Internal(backsolve(R, coef., p, TRUE, FALSE))

    i <- i + 1
  }

  out
}

# simulate data
set.seed(101)
n <- 1000
wdth = 100
X <- matrix(rnorm(10 * n), n, 10)
y <- drop(X %*% runif(10)) + rnorm(n)
Z <- cbind(y, X)

# assign other function
dolm <- function(x) 
  coef(lm.fit(x[, -1], x[, 1]))

# show that they yield the same
library(zoo)
all.equal(
  rollapply(Z, wdth, FUN = dolm,  
            by.column = FALSE,  align = "right", fill = NA_real_),
  roll_coef(X, y, wdth), 
  check.attributes = FALSE)
#R> [1] TRUE

# benchmark
library(compiler)
roll_coef <- cmpfun(roll_coef)
dolm <- cmpfun(dolm)
microbenchmark::microbenchmark(
  new =  roll_coef(X, y, wdth),
  prev = rollapply(Z, wdth, FUN = dolm,  
                   by.column = FALSE,  align = "right", fill = NA_real_), 
  times = 10)
#R> Unit: milliseconds
#R>  expr        min         lq       mean     median         uq       max neval cld
#R>   new   8.631319   9.010579   9.808525   9.659665   9.973741  11.87083    10  a 
#R>  prev 118.257128 121.734860 124.489826 122.882318 127.195410 135.21280    10   b

The solution above requires that you form the model.matrix and model.response first but this is just three calls (one extra to model.frame) prior to the call to roll_coef.