Error in as.Date.numeric() : 'origin' must be supplied - r

Question

I have received a paper in which they included the R files for their empirical results. Nevertheless, I have some problems while trying to run their codes:
data <- vni$R[198:length(vni$R)]; date <- vni$Date[198:length(vni$R)]
l <- length(data)
rw_length <- 52 # 52 weeks (~ 1 year)
bound <- vector()
avr <- vector()
for (i in (rw_length+1):l) {
AVR.test <- AutoBoot.test(data[(i-rw_length):i],nboot=2000,"Normal",c(0.025, 0.975))
bound <- append(bound, AVR.test$CI.stat)
avr <- append(avr, AVR.test$test.stat)
}
lower <- bound[seq(1, length(bound), 2)]
upper <- bound[seq(2, length(bound), 2)]
results <- matrix(c(date[(rw_length+1):l],data[(rw_length+1):l],avr,upper, lower),ncol=5, dimnames = list(c(),c("Date", "Return", "AVR", "Upper", "Lower")))
And I get the following error: `
Error in as.Date.numeric(e) : 'origin' must be supplied`
for the results <- matrix(c(date[(rw_length+1):l],data[(rw_length+1):l],avr,upper, lower),ncol=5, dimnames = list(c(),c("Date", "Return", "AVR", "Upper", "Lower")))
My dataset is:
Date P R
1 2001-03-23 259.60 0.0000000000
2 2001-03-30 269.30 0.0366840150
3 2001-04-06 284.69 0.0555748690
4 2001-04-13 300.36 0.0535808860
5 2001-04-20 317.76 0.0563146260
...
935 2019-02-15 950.89 0.0454163960
936 2019-02-22 988.91 0.0392049380
937 2019-03-01 979.63 -0.0094283770
Could you please help me with that issue?
Thanks alot!

Answer 1

Everything in a matrix must be the same class. This is often found when there's a string among numbers, where
m <- matrix(0, nr=2, nc=2)
m
# [,1] [,2]
# [1,] 0 0
# [2,] 0 0
m[1] <- "a"
m
# [,1] [,2]
# [1,] "a" "0"
# [2,] "0" "0"
In this case, you have Date (first column) and numeric (all others? no idea what AutoBoot is). And because it's trying to coerce from least-complex to most-complex (from numeric to Date), the non-Date objects are being converted.
matrix(c(Sys.Date(), 1.1))
# Error in as.Date.numeric(e) : 'origin' must be supplied
I suggest that trying to store this in a matrix is therefore fundamentally flawed. If you want to store a Date object among numbers, you have two options:
Store it as a data.frame, where each column can have its own class.
Pre-convert the "Date" data to numeric and store it as a number. This means that if/when you need the dates to be of class Date again, you'll need to as.Date(..., origin="1970-01-01").