R data.table grouping for lagged regression

Question

table with data (its a data.table object) that looks like the following :

      date         stock_id logret
   1: 2011-01-01        1  0.001
   2: 2011-01-0         


        

Answer 1

Just some additional notes due to Alex's comment. The reason you have difficulties understanding what's going on here is that a lot of things are done within one line. So it's always a good idea to break things down.

What do we actually want? We want a new column lagret and the syntax to add a new column in data.table is the following:

DT[, lagret := xxx]

where xxx has to be filled up with whatever you want to have in column lagret. So if we just want a new column that gives us the rows, we could just call

DT[, lagret := seq(from=1, to=nrow(DT))]

Here, we actually want the lagged value of logret, but we have to consider that there are many stocks in here. That's why we do a self-join, i.e. we join the data.table DT with itself by the columns stock_id and date, but since we want the previous value of each stock, we use date-1. Note that we have to set the keys first to do such a join:

setkeyv(DT,c('stock_id','date'))
DT[list(stock_id,date-1)]
    stock_id       date logret
 1:        1 2010-12-31     NA
 2:        1 2011-01-01  0.001
 3:        1 2011-01-02  0.003
 4:        1 2011-01-03  0.005
 5:        1 2011-01-04  0.007
 6:        1 2011-01-05  0.009
...

As you can see, we now have what we want. logret is now lagged by one period. But we actually want that in a new column lagret in DT, so we just get that column by calling [[3L]] (this means nothing else then get me the third column) and name this new column lagret:

DT[,lagret:=DT[list(stock_id,date-1),logret][[3L]]]
          date stock_id logret lagret
 1: 2011-01-01        1  0.001     NA
 2: 2011-01-02        1  0.003  0.001
 3: 2011-01-03        1  0.005  0.003
 4: 2011-01-04        1  0.007  0.005
 5: 2011-01-05        1  0.009  0.007
...

This is already the correct solution. In this simple case, we do not need roll=TRUE because there are no gaps in the dates. However, in a more realistic example (as mentioned above, for instance when we have weekends), there might be gaps. So let's make such a realistic example by just deleting two days in the DT for the first stock:

DT <- DT[-c(4, 5)]
setkeyv(DT,c('stock_id','date'))
DT[,lagret:=DT[list(stock_id,date-1),logret][[3L]]]
          date stock_id logret lagret
 1: 2011-01-01        1  0.001     NA
 2: 2011-01-02        1  0.003  0.001
 3: 2011-01-03        1  0.005  0.003
 4: 2011-01-06        1  0.011     NA
 5: 2011-01-01        2  0.013     NA
...

As you can see, the problem is now that we don't have a value for the 6th of January. That's why we use roll=TRUE:

DT[,lagret:=DT[list(stock_id,date-1),logret,roll=TRUE][[3L]]]
          date stock_id logret lagret
 1: 2011-01-01        1  0.001     NA
 2: 2011-01-02        1  0.003  0.001
 3: 2011-01-03        1  0.005  0.003
 4: 2011-01-06        1  0.011  0.005
 5: 2011-01-01        2  0.013     NA
...

Just have a look on the documentation on how roll=TRUE works exactly. In a nutshell: If it can't find the previous value (here logret for the 5th of January), it just takes the last available one (here from the 3rd of January).

Answer 2

Update:

In the current development version of data.table, v1.9.5, shift() is implemented #965, which takes two types at the moment type = "lag" (default) and type = "lead". See ?shift for more on usage.

With this, we can simply do:

# type="lag" may be omitted, as it is the default.
require(data.table) ## 1.9.5+
DT[, lagret := shift(logret, 1L, type="lag"), by=stock_id]
#           date stock_id logret lagret
#  1: 2011-01-01        1  0.001     NA
#  2: 2011-01-02        1  0.003  0.001
#  3: 2011-01-03        1  0.005  0.003
#  4: 2011-01-04        1  0.007  0.005
#  5: 2011-01-05        1  0.009  0.007
#  6: 2011-01-06        1  0.011  0.009
#  7: 2011-01-01        2  0.013     NA
#  8: 2011-01-02        2  0.015  0.013
#  9: 2011-01-03        2  0.017  0.015
# 10: 2011-01-04        2  0.019  0.017
# 11: 2011-01-05        2  0.021  0.019
# 12: 2011-01-06        2  0.023  0.021
# 13: 2011-01-01        3  0.025     NA
# 14: 2011-01-02        3  0.027  0.025
# 15: 2011-01-03        3  0.029  0.027
# 16: 2011-01-04        3  0.031  0.029
# 17: 2011-01-05        3  0.033  0.031
# 18: 2011-01-06        3  0.035  0.033

Answer 3

Thanks to Matthew Dowle's advice, I was able to use the following :

DT[,lagret:=DT[list(stock_id,date-1),logret,roll=TRUE][[3L]]]

Results are :

             date stock_id logret lagret
 1: 2011-01-01        1  0.001     NA
 2: 2011-01-02        1  0.003  0.001
 3: 2011-01-03        1  0.005  0.003
 4: 2011-01-04        1  0.007  0.005
 5: 2011-01-05        1  0.009  0.007
 6: 2011-01-06        1  0.011  0.009
 7: 2011-01-01        2  0.013     NA
 8: 2011-01-02        2  0.015  0.013
 9: 2011-01-03        2  0.017  0.015
10: 2011-01-04        2  0.019  0.017
11: 2011-01-05        2  0.021  0.019
12: 2011-01-06        2  0.023  0.021
13: 2011-01-01        3  0.025     NA
14: 2011-01-02        3  0.027  0.025
15: 2011-01-03        3  0.029  0.027
16: 2011-01-04        3  0.031  0.029
17: 2011-01-05        3  0.033  0.031
18: 2011-01-06        3  0.035  0.033