Moving average with varying time window in R

Question

I want to compute a moving average over a certain time window without generating NAs at the beginning of the time series. For instance, if I set the time window to 3, the 2

Answer 1

@thelatemail has done a great job, but he had an error in the code (test[] should be replaced with x[] inside the function) and more importantly he had to do the same thing for the end of the vector (if you want side=2). Also the window size should be twice+1 of the ith element in the vector (and n-ith element at the end). so, here is the final version:

movavg.grow = function(x,window) {
  startma = sapply(1:(floor(window/2)),function(y) mean(x[1:((y-1)*2+1)]))
  endma = sapply(1:(floor(window/2)),function(y) mean(x[(length(x)-((y-1)*2)):length(x)]))
  endma = rev(endma)
  c(startma,
    filter(x,rep(1/window,window))[(floor(window/2):(length(x)- floor(window)/2)+1)],
    endma)
}

As for a test, what you want must return 1:10 for x=1:10

> x=1:10
> x
 [1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10
> movavg.grow(x,5)
 [1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10
> movavg.grow(x,3)
 [1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10