Finding newest data older than a specific date in R - r

Question

I have a two data.frames (call them dataset.new and dataset.old) that both contain information about some individuals. These individuals all have a identification number (a variable we can call ”individual”) that occurs in both of the data.frames and each frame has information on when the data was collected, stored in a column that we can call ”some.date”.
The second of these two data.frames (dataset.old) contains historical data for the individuals, i.e. values of some other variables measured at other times and thus each individual appears many times in dataset.old.
What I wish to do is the following. For each individual in dataset.new, find the rows from dataset.old that are the newest but still older than the observations in dataset.new. For the individuals that have no such date present in dataset.old, I want it to return NA.
This is perhaps easiest illustrated through some example data, presented below.
dataset.new
individual some.date
1 1 2016-05-01
2 2 2016-01-28
3 7 2016-03-03
dataset.old
individual some.date
1 1 2016-01-12
2 1 2015-12-30
3 1 2016-04-27
4 1 2016-05-02
5 2 2015-11-15
6 2 2012-01-27
7 2 2016-02-06
8 3 2016-04-30
9 3 2016-01-27
10 4 2016-03-01
11 4 2011-01-16
In this example, I am looking for a way get the following output:
individual row.nr
1 1 3
2 2 5
3 7 NA
since those rows correspond to the newest data in dataset.old that still is older than the data in dataset.new.
I have a code that solves the problem, but it is too slow for the data that I have in mind (which has well over 20 000 rows in dataset.new and many, many more in dataset.old). My solution is basically a loop over all individuals, subsetting the data at each stage.
find.previous <- function(dataset.old, individual, some.new.date){
subsetted.dataset <- dataset.old[dataset.old[, "individual"] == individual, ] # We only look at the individual in question.
subsetted.dataset <- subsetted.dataset[subsetted.dataset[, "some.date"] < some.new.date, ]# Here we get all the rows that have data that are measured BEFORE timepoint.
row.index <- which.min(some.new.date - subsetted.dataset[, "some.date"]) # This can be done, since we have already made sure that fromdatum < timepoint.
ifelse(length(row.index)!= 0, as.integer(rownames(subsetted.dataset[row.index,])), NA) # Then we output the row that had that information.
}
output <- matrix(ncol=2, nrow=0)
for(i in 1:nrow(dataset.new)){
output <- rbind(output, cbind(dataset.new[, "individual"][i], find.previous(dataset.old, dataset.new[, "individual"][i], dataset.new[, "some.date"][i])))
}
colnames(output) <- c("individual", "row.nr")
output
Any help on how to solve this problem would be greatly appreciated. I have tried using my Google skills as well as reading other posts on here stackoverflow, but without success.
The example data can be replicated by copying the following lines of code:
dataset.new <- data.frame(individual=c(1, 2, 7), some.date=as.Date(c("2016-05-01", "2016-01-28", "2016-03-03")))
dataset.old <- data.frame(individual=c(1,1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,4,4), some.date=as.Date(c("2016-01-12", "2015-12-30", "2016-04-27", "2016-05-02", "2015-11-15", "2012-01-27", "2016-02-06", "2016-04-30", "2016-01-27", "2016-03-01", "2011-01-16")))

Answer 1

You can solve this efficiently with a merge.
First make the rownumber variable you want in dataset.old. Then merge dataset.new with dataset.old on individual (left join, or merge(lhs, rhs, all.x = TRUE)). This can get you:
dataset.old
individual new.date old.date old.rownumber
1 1 2016-05-01 2016-01-12 1
2 1 2016-05-01 2015-12-30 2
3 1 2016-05-01 2016-04-27 3
4 1 2016-05-01 2016-05-02 4
5 2 2016-01-28 2015-11-15 5
6 2 2016-01-28 2012-01-27 6
7 2 2016-01-28 2016-02-06 7
8 7 2016-03-03 NA NA
Subset to new.date > old.date or is.na(old.date):
dataset.old
individual new.date old.date old.rownumber
1 1 2016-05-01 2016-01-12 1
2 1 2016-05-01 2015-12-30 2
3 1 2016-05-01 2016-04-27 3
5 2 2016-01-28 2015-11-15 5
6 2 2016-01-28 2012-01-27 6
8 7 2016-03-03 NA NA
Subset to old.date == max(old.date) or is.na(old.date) grouped by individual.
dataset.old
individual new.date old.date old.rownumber
3 1 2016-05-01 2016-04-27 3
6 2 2016-01-28 2012-01-27 5
8 7 2016-03-03 NA NA
Edit:
I'm partial to data.table. The code would look something like:
dataset.old[, old.rownumber := 1:.N]
setnames(dataset.old, "some.date", "old.date")
setnames(dataset.new, "some.date", "new.date")
dataset.merge <- merge(dataset.old, dataset.new, by = "individual", all.x = TRUE)
dataset.merge <- dataset.merge[, new.date > old.date]
dataset.merge[old.date == max(old.date) | is.na(old.date), by = individual]

Answer 2

We can skip the NA search by finding the minimum square root. The negative values will be coerced to missing for us:
dataset.old$rn <- 1:nrow(dataset.old)
minp <- function(x) if(!length(m <- which.min(as.numeric(x)^.5))) NA else m
mrg <- merge(dataset.new, dataset.old, by="individual", all.x=TRUE)
mrg %>% group_by(individual) %>%
summarise(row.nr=rn[minp(some.date.x - some.date.y)])
# A tibble: 3 x 2
# individual row.nr
# <int> <int>
# 1 1 3
# 2 2 5
# 3 7 NA