calculating sum of previous 3 rows in R data.table (by grid-square)

Question

I would like to calculate the rainfall that has fallen over the last three days for each grid square, and add this as a new column in my data.table. To be clear, I want to s

Answer 1

A dplyr solution:

library(dplyr)
weather %>% 
  group_by(square) %>% 
  mutate(rain_3 = rain + lag(rain) + lag(rain, n = 2L))

Result:

Source: local data table [10 x 4]

    rain square desired_result rain_3
   (dbl)  (dbl)          (dbl) (dbl)
1     NA      1             NA    NA
2     NA      1             NA    NA
3     NA      1             NA    NA
4      0      1             NA    NA
5      0      1             NA    NA
6      5      1              5     5
7      1      1              6     6
8      0      1              6     6
9      3      1              4     4
10    10      2             NA    NA

If you want to assign rain3 to your dataset, you can use the %<>% symbol from maggritr in your pipe:

library(magrittr)
weather %<>%
  group_by......