calculating ages in R by subtracting two dates columns - r

Question

I have 2 columns with ~ 2000 rows of dates in them. One is a variable with a visit date (df$visitdate), and the other is a birth date of the individual (df$birthday).
Wondering if there is any simple way to subtract the visit date - birth date to create the variable "age at the time of the visit", accounting for leap years, etc.
I tried to use the following code (from an answer in a similar question) but it didn't work in my case.
find number of seconds in one year:
seconds_in_a_year <- as.integer((seconds(ymd("2010-01-01")) - seconds(ymd("2009-01-01"))))
now obtain number of seconds between the 2 dates you desire
seconds_between_dates <- as.integer(seconds(date1) - seconds(date2))
your final answer for number of years in floating points will be
years_between_dates <- seconds_between_dates / seconds_in_a_year
When I tried to apply this to my data frame (note: using variables rather than specific dates, so this may be the cause) I got the following:
seconds_in_a_year <- as.integer((seconds(ymd(df$visitdate)) - seconds(ymd(df$birthday))))
Warning message:
NAs introduced by coercion
Following the code along I got a final output of:
years_between_dates
[1] 1.157407e-05 [2] 1.157407e-05
Any help is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Subtracting from a Date object another Date object gives you the time difference in days, e.g.
> dates = as.Date(c("2007-03-01", "2004-05-23"))
>
> dates[1] - dates[2]
Time difference of 1012 days
So, assuming 365 days in a year
> age_time_visit = as.numeric(dates[1] - dates[2]) / 365
> age_time_visit
[1] 2.772603

Answer 2

There are various answers for this scattered around the internet.
I think the one I've typically used was inspired by Professor Ripley:
http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Calculate-difference-between-dates-in-years-td835196.html
age_years <- function(first, second)
{
lt <- data.frame(first, second)
age <- as.numeric(format(lt[,2],format="%Y")) - as.numeric(format(lt[,1],format="%Y"))
first <- as.Date(paste(format(lt[,2],format="%Y"),"-",format(lt[,1],format="%m-%d"),sep=""))
age[which(first > lt[,2])] <- age[which(first > lt[,2])] - 1
age
}
There's another approach at https://gist.github.com/mmparker/7254445
Or you you just want to raw, decimal value of years, you can get the number of days and divide by 365.2425

Answer 3

Here is an approach that accounts for leap years (don't know if this has been done before, but suspect it has...).
get.age <- function(from, to) {
require(lubridate) # for leap_year(...)
n <- as.integer(to-from)
n.l <- sum(leap_year(seq(from,to,by=1)))
n.l/366 + (n+1-n.l)/365
}
get.age(as.Date("2009-01-01"),as.Date("2012-12-31"))
# [1] 4
get.age(as.Date("2012-01-01"),as.Date("2012-01-31")) # 2012 was a leap year
# [1] 0.08469945
get.age(as.Date("2011-01-01"),as.Date("2011-01-31")) # 2011 was not
# [1] 0.08493151
So the basic idea is to create a vector with one element for every day between from and to (inclusive), then for each day account for whether that day is part of a leap year or not. The we add up the leap year days and the non-leap year days separately and calculate the number of years as:
leap-year-days/366 + non-leap-year-days/365
This works for single dates (vectors of length 1). To enable this for columns of dates, as you asked, we use Vectorize(...).
vget.age <- Vectorize(get.age) # vectorized version
And then a demo:
# example data set
set.seed(1) # for reproducible example
today <- as.Date("2015-09-09")
df <- data.frame(birth.date=today-sample(1000:10000,2000)) # 2000 birthdays
result <- vget.age(df$birth.date,today) # how old are they?
head(result)
# [1] 9.282192 11.909589 16.854795 25.115068 7.706849 24.865753