R package ‘lagged’ provides classes and methods for objects, like autocovariances, whose natural indexing starts from zero.

Installing lagged

The latest stable version is on CRAN.

install_packages("lagged")

The vignette shipping with the package gives illustrative examples. vignette("Guide_lagged", package = "lagged").

You can install the development version of lagged from Github:

library(devtools)
install_github("GeoBosh/lagged")

Overview

The package provides several classes with methods for indexing starting from zero. Objects can be created with the function Lagged(). It returns a suitable Lagged object from a class suitable for the argument:

library(lagged)
v_lagged <- Lagged(0:6)                           # 1d object
m_lagged <- Lagged(matrix(1:12, nrow = 4))        # 2d object
a_lagged <- Lagged(array(1:24, dim = c(4,3,2)))  # 3d object

It recognises also "acf" objects from base R time series functions:

ap_lagged <- Lagged(acf(AirPassengers, plot = FALSE))

The maximal lag stored in the object can be obtained with maxLag():

maxLag(v_lagged)
maxLag(m_lagged)
maxLag(a_lagged)

The length of the objects is equal to maxlag(object) + 1.

length(v_lagged)
length(m_lagged)
length(a_lagged)

Subsetting with "[" drops the laggedness and returns vector, matrix, or array, depending on the dimension of the object. Subsetting with one index gives the data for the requested lags:

tmp <- v_lagged[0:2]
tmp <- m_lagged[0:2]
tmp <- a_lagged[0:1]

Values beyond the maximal lag are NA. Dimensions are not dropped if an extent has length one (i.e. drop = FALSE):

v_lagged[0]
m_lagged[0]
a_lagged[0]

To drop dimensions, use “[[”:

v_lagged[[0]]
m_lagged[[0]]
a_lagged[[0]]

Arithmetic operations and mathematical functions are defined naturally on lagged objects. The shorter one is extended with NA’s to the length of the longer.

Operations between lagged and base R objects are defined, as well. However, it is an error to do operations between objects whose dimensions do not match, unless the base R object is a scalar, or, more generally, has the size of x[[0] ].