How to make all the months to have an equal number of days (for example 22 days) for a MIDAS regression in R - r

Question

This is a follow up question for these two posts.
How to deal with impossible dates for midasr package
https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/77495/what-can-i-do-with-these-two-time-series
I need to use mls function in MIDAS package in R to transform the high frequency (daily) financial data to low frequency (quarterly) macroeconomic data.
The author #mpiktas mentioned
You must make all the months to have an equal number of days. And then
set frequency to that number. You can achieve that by discarding data,
padding NAs or extrapolating.
and
You could use zoo objects to make the padding easier, but in the end
simple numeric vector should be passed.
I tried different ways to search and did not find an easy way to implement.
I use dplyr to get each month to have 31 days with 7-11 NA.
# generate the date vector
library(midasr)
library(dplyr)
library(quantmod)
tsxdate <- as.Date( paste(1979, rep(1:12, each=31), 1:31, sep="-") )
for (year in 1980:2015){
tsxdate <- c(tsxdate,as.Date( paste(year, rep(1:12, each=31), 1:31, sep="-") ))
}
# transform to dataframe
tsxdate.df <- as.data.frame(tsxdate)
# get the stock market index from yahoo
tsxindex <- getSymbols("^GSPTSE",src="yahoo", from = '1977-01-01', auto.assign = FALSE)
# merge two data frame to get each month with 31 days
tsx.df <- left_join(tsxdate.df, tsxindex)
I doubt this caused a problem due to too many NAs.
I put the new daily data into MIDAS regression in R. It did not work. None of the weight functions work.
# since each month has 31 days. one quarter yy correspond to 93 days data.
midas_r(midas_r(yy~trend+fmls(zz,30,93,nealmon) ,start=list(zz=rep(0,4))), Ofunction="nls")
Could you tell me how to make all the months to have an equal number of days?
update:
Finally, I got a way in zoo package with aggregate and first function. It is not perfect, but it works and fast. first will add NAs according to the parameter.
I still need to figure out how to fit it into a MIDAS regression.
# get data
tsx <- getSymbols("^GSPTSE",src="yahoo", from = '1977-01-01', auto.assign = FALSE)
# subset
# generate a zoo object
library(zoo)
tsx.zoo <- zoo(tsx$GSPTSE.Adjusted)
# group by yearmonth and take first 22 days data.
days <-aggregate(tsx.zoo, as.yearmon, first, 22)
It looks like this: each row is one month with 22 days data.
Jun 1979 1614.29 NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA
Jul 1979 1614.29 1598.73 1579.88 1582.57 1582.27 1576.19 1559.23 1529.81 1533.50 1547.66
Aug 1979 1554.14 1556.94 1553.84 1553.84 1551.95 1561.23 1562.52 1571.00 1578.08 1580.28
Sep 1979 1685.11 1657.58 1690.10 1720.92 1716.53 1711.34 1722.71 1714.63 1727.50 1724.51
Oct 1979 1749.05 1767.40 1775.98 1786.35 1800.12 1800.12 1735.88 1685.21 1681.52 1670.65
Nov 1979 1599.33 1606.81 1596.54 1592.94 1574.49 1569.20 1583.97 1608.70 1611.00 1619.78
Jun 1979 NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA
Jul 1979 1556.94 1546.86 1548.46 1553.54 1542.07 1543.17 1552.85 1566.01 1573.99 1564.12
Aug 1979 1596.64 1602.82 1615.09 1636.53 1653.09 1660.97 1657.78 1665.46 1674.44 1674.64
Sep 1979 1714.73 1717.53 1732.59 1736.48 1731.19 1732.49 1746.75 1754.33 1747.45 NA
Oct 1979 1639.03 1613.19 1616.29 1635.34 1593.44 1533.40 1522.12 1534.49 1517.24 1523.92
Nov 1979 1628.55 1621.57 1624.36 1627.56 1620.27 1647.51 1677.93 1683.81 1690.70 1698.97
Jun 1979 NA NA
Jul 1979 1554.14 NA
Aug 1979 1674.24 1675.43
Sep 1979 NA NA
Oct 1979 1538.68 1552.25
update again:
#mpiktas gives a better and right way to do it.
1 NAs should be padded at beginning of each period.
2 Data should be gather in the frequency of response variable. In my case, it is quarterly.
His function can be used in aggregate function in zoo. I guess it do the same job as group_by plus do in dplyr: split, operate, and give back a list of results. I try this
tsxdaily <- aggregate(tsx.zoo, yearqtr, padd_nas, 66)
yearqtr is the frequency of response variable.

Answer 1

Here is one possible way of how to add NAs.
First, note that MIDAS regression puts the emphasis on the last values of the period, so you need to put NAs in front, not in the back.
Suppose that we have the following dummy data:
> dt <- data.frame(Day=1:10,Quarter=c(rep(1,6),rep(2,4)),value=1:10)
> dt
Day Quarter value
1 1 1 1
2 2 1 2
3 3 1 3
4 4 1 4
5 5 1 5
6 6 1 6
7 7 2 7
8 8 2 8
9 9 2 9
10 10 2 10
In this example there are two quarters, the first one has 6 days, the second one 4. Suppose we want to harmonize the data, so that the quarter has 7 days (for example).
Define simple function which adds NAs at the beginning of the data:
padd_nas <- function(x, desired_length) {
n <- length(x)
if(n < desired_length) {
c(rep(NA,desired_length-n),x)
} else {
tail(x,desired_length)
}
}
Here is an example illustrating how this function works:
> padd_nas(1:4,7)
[1] NA NA NA 1 2 3 4
>
Now add NAs for each quarter and make sure that the data is ordered by day:
library(dplyr)
pdt <- dt %>% arrange(Day) %>% group_by(Quarter) %>% do(pv = padd_nas(.$value, 7))
> pdt
Source: local data frame [2 x 2]
Groups: <by row>
Quarter pv
1 1 <int[7]>
2 2 <int[7]>
To get the padded result simply use unlist on column pv:
> pv <- pdt$pv %>% unlist
> pv
[1] NA 1 2 3 4 5 6 NA NA NA 7 8 9 10
Now we can prepared this for MIDAS regression with mls. Suppose that only last 3 days are relevant for each quarter:
> library(midasr)
> mls(pv, 0:2, 7)
X.0/m X.1/m X.2/m
[1,] 6 5 4
[2,] 10 9 8
Compare this with original data dt.
This approach can be generalized for any low and high frequency data configuration.