How can I automatically create n lags in a timeseries?

Question

I have a dataframe with a column t. I want to create n lagged columns that has names like t-1,t-2 etc..

  year      t  t-1 t-2
19620101    1   NA  NA
1963010         


        

Answer 1

I might build something around base R's embed()

x <- c(rep(NA,2),1:6)
embed(x,3)
#      [,1] [,2] [,3]
# [1,]    1   NA   NA
# [2,]    2    1   NA
# [3,]    3    2    1
# [4,]    4    3    2
# [5,]    5    4    3
# [6,]    6    5    4

Perhaps something like this:

f <- function(x, dimension, pad) {
    if(!missing(pad)) {
        x <- c(rep(pad, dimension-1), x)
    }
    embed(x, dimension)
}
f(1:6, dimension=3, pad=NA)
#      [,1] [,2] [,3]
# [1,]    1   NA   NA
# [2,]    2    1   NA
# [3,]    3    2    1
# [4,]    4    3    2
# [5,]    5    4    3
# [6,]    6    5    4