r - Extract subsequences with specific time increments - r

Question

I have a data frame df. It has several columns, two of them are dates and serial_day, corresponding to the date an observation was taken and MATLAB's serial day. I would like to restrict my time series such that the increment (in days) between two consecutive observations is 3 or 4 and separate such blocks by a NA row.
It is known that consecutive daily observations never occur and the case of 2 day separation followed by 2 day separation is rare, so it can be ignored.
In the example, increment is shown for convenience, but it is easily generated using the diff function. So, if the data frame is
serial_day increment
1 4 NA
2 7 3
3 10 3
4 12 2
5 17 5
6 19 2
7 22 3
8 25 3
9 29 4
10 34 5
I would hope to get a new data frame as:
serial_day increment
1 4 NA
2 7 3
3 10 3
4 NA ## Entire row of NAs NA
5 19 NA
6 22 3
7 25 3
8 29 4
9 NA ## Entire row of NAs NA
I can't figure out a way to do this without looping, which is bad idea in R.

Answer 1

First you check in which rows the increment is not equal to 3 or 4. Then you'd replace these rows with a row of NAs:
inds <- which( df$increment > 4 | df$increment < 3 )
df[inds, ] <- rep(NA, ncol(df))
# serial_day increment
# 1 4 NA
# 2 7 3
# 3 10 3
# 4 NA NA
# 5 NA NA
# 6 NA NA
# 7 22 3
# 8 25 3
# 9 29 4
# 10 NA NA
This may result in multiple consecutive rows of NAs. In order to reduce these consecutive NA-rows to a single NA-row, you'd check where the NA-rows are located with which() and then see whether these locations are consecutive with diff() and remove these rows from df:
NArows <- which(rowSums(is.na(df)) == ncol(df)) # c(4, 5, 6, 10)
inds2 <- NArows[c(FALSE, diff(NArows) == 1)] # c(5, 6)
df <- df[-inds2, ]
# serial_day increment
# 1 4 NA
# 2 7 3
# 3 10 3
# 4 NA NA
# 7 22 3
# 8 25 3
# 9 29 4
# 10 NA NA