function in R that creates dummies for given time period - r

Question

There is a data frame like this:
The first two columns in the df describe the start date (month and year) and the end date (month and year). Column names describe every single month and year of a certain time period.
I need a function/loop that insterts "1" or "0" in each cell - "1" when the date from given column name is within the period described by the two first columns, and "0" if not.
I would appreciate any help.

Answer 1

You want to do two different things. (a) create a dummy variable and (b) see if a particular date is in an interval.
Making a dummy variable is the easiest one, in base R you can use ifelse. For example in the iris data frame:
iris$dummy <- ifelse(iris$Sepal.Width > 2.5, 1, 0)
Now working with dates is more complicated. In this answer we will use the library lubridate. First you need to convert all those dates to a format 'Month Year' to something that R can understand. For example for February you could do:
new_format_february_2016 <- interval(ymd('2016-02-01'), ymd('2016-03-01') - dseconds(1))
#[1] 2016-02-01 UTC--2016-02-29 23:59:59 UTC
This is February, the interval of time from the 1 of February to one second before the 1 of March. You can do the same with your start date column and you end date column.
To compare two intevals of time (so, to see if a particular month fall into your other intervals) you can do:
int_overlaps(new_format_february_2016, other_interval)
If this returns true, the two intervals (one particular month and another one) overlaps. This is not the same as one being inside another, but in your case it will work. Using this you can iterate over different columns and rows and build your dummy variable.
But before doing so, I would recommend to clean your data, as your current format is complicate to work with. To get all the power that vector types in R provides ideally you would want to have one row per observation and one variable per column. This does not seem to be the case with your data frame. Take a look to the chapter 'Tidy data' of 'R for Data Science' specially the spreading and gathering subsection:
Tidy data