Create a time interval of 15 minutes from minutely data in R?

Question

I have some data which is formatted in the following way:

time     count 
00:00    17
00:01    62
00:02    41

So I have from 00:00 to 23:5

Answer 1

The cut approach is handy but slow with large data frames. The following approach is approximately 1,000x faster than the cut approach (tested with 400k records.)

  #     Function: Truncate (floor) POSIXct to time interval (specified in seconds)
  #       Author: Stephen McDaniel @ PowerTrip Analytics
  #        Date : 2017MAY
  #    Copyright: (C) 2017 by Freakalytics, LLC
  #      License: MIT

  floor_datetime <- function(date_var, floor_seconds = 60, 
        origin = "1970-01-01") { # defaults to minute rounding
     if(!is(date_var, "POSIXct")) stop("Please pass in a POSIXct variable")
     if(is.na(date_var)) return(as.POSIXct(NA)) else {
        return(as.POSIXct(floor(as.numeric(date_var) / 
           (floor_seconds))*(floor_seconds), origin = origin))
     }
  }

Sample output:

test <- data.frame(good = as.POSIXct(Sys.time()), 
   bad1 = as.Date(Sys.time()),
   bad2 = as.POSIXct(NA))

test$good_15 <- floor_datetime(test$good, 15 * 60)
test$bad1_15 <- floor_datetime(test$bad1, 15 * 60)
Error in floor_datetime(test$bad, 15 * 60) : 
  Please pass in a POSIXct variable
test$bad2_15 <- floor_datetime(test$bad2, 15 * 60)

test

                        good       bad1 bad2             good_15 bad2_15
    1 2017-05-06 13:55:34.48 2017-05-06  2007-05-06 13:45:00