[R] Moving Average

[Carl Witthoft]

Along similar lines, I wrote a toy script to apply any function you want 
  in a windowed sense.  Be warned that it's about 10000 times slower 
than loess().


# my  own boxcar tool, just because.
# use bfunc to specify what function to apply to the windowed
# region.
# basically must be valid function name and must accept
# single value or vector of values
# "pad" generates partial-width values at ends of x so output is
# same length as input.
# and make it optional for picky people
boxcar<-function(x, width=5, bfunc='mean', pad=TRUE){
	goodfunc<-try(bfunc<-get(bfunc),silent=TRUE)
	if (inherits (goodfunc,"try-error")) {
		stop ('"', bfunc,'"', ' is not a known function', call.=FALSE)
		}
	# paranoid, force width to be integer
	width<-floor(width)
	# fix width given definition of window() inputs
	width<-max(0,(width-1))
	if (width%%2 == 1) cat('Warning: window is even length, hence 
asymmetric\n')
	#adjust start, end points to half-window width; keep output length right
	seqstart<- 1 -pad*((width+1)%/%2)
	seqend<- length(x)- width + pad*(width%/%2)
	boxout<-mapply(function(shiftx) {
		bfunc(window(x,max(shiftx,1), min(shiftx+width,length(x)) ) )
		} ,seq(seqstart, seqend) )
		return(invisible(boxout))
	}