Sum over rows (rollapply) with time decay

Question

This is a follow on question to a question I posted earlier (see Sum over rows with multiple changing conditions R data.table for more details). I want to calculate how many tim

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly, you are trying to do a rollapply with width=5 and rather than do a simple sum, you want to do a weighted sum. The weights are the age of the experience relative to the 5 year window. I would do this: first set the key in your data.table so that it has proper increasing order by Name, then you know that the last item in your x variable is the youngest and the first item is the oldest (you do this in your code already). I can't quite tell which way you want the weights to go (youngest to have greatest weight or oldest) but you get the point:

setkey(m, Name, Year)
my_fun = function(x) { w = 1:length(x); sum(x*w)}
m[,Exp_age:=rollapply(I2, width=5, by=1, fill=NA, FUN=my_fun, by.column=FALSE, align="right") ,by=Name]