Calculate days since last event in R

Question

My question involves how to calculate the number of days since an event last that occurred in R. Below is a minimal example of the data:

df <- data.frame         


        

Answer 1

You could try something like this:

# make an index of the latest events
last_event_index <- cumsum(df$event) + 1

# shift it by one to the right
last_event_index <- c(1, last_event_index[1:length(last_event_index) - 1])

# get the dates of the events and index the vector with the last_event_index, 
# added an NA as the first date because there was no event
last_event_date <- c(as.Date(NA), df[which(df$event==1), "date"])[last_event_index]

# substract the event's date with the date of the last event
df$tae <- df$date - last_event_date
df

#        date event      tae
#1 2000-07-06     0  NA days
#2 2000-09-15     0  NA days
#3 2000-10-15     1  NA days
#4 2001-01-03     0  80 days
#5 2001-03-17     1 153 days
#6 2001-05-23     1  67 days
#7 2001-08-26     0  95 days