[R] C/C++/Fortran Rolling Window Regressions

jeremiah rounds roundsjeremiah at gmail.com
Thu Jul 21 20:02:57 CEST 2016


Hi,

A not unusual task is performing a multiple regression in a rolling window
on a time-series.    A standard piece of advice for doing in R is something
like the code that follows at the end of the email.  I am currently using
an "embed" variant of that code and that piece of advice is out there too.

But, it occurs to me that for such an easily specified matrix operation
standard R code is really slow.   rollapply constantly returns to R
interpreter at each window step for a new lm.   All lm is at its heart is
(X^t X)^(-1) * Xy,  and if you think about doing that with Rcpp in rolling
window you are just incrementing a counter and peeling off rows (or columns
of X and y) of a particular window size, and following that up with some
matrix multiplication in a loop.   The psuedo-code for that Rcpp
practically writes itself and you might want a wrapper of something like:
rolling_lm (y=y, x=x, width=4).

My question is this: has any of the thousands of R packages out there
published anything like that.  Rolling window multiple regressions that
stay in C/C++ until the rolling window completes?  No sense and writing it
if it exist.


Thanks,
Jeremiah

Standard (slow) advice for "rolling window regression" follows:


set.seed(1)
z <- zoo(matrix(rnorm(10), ncol = 2))
colnames(z) <- c("y", "x")

## rolling regression of width 4
rollapply(z, width = 4,
   function(x) coef(lm(y ~ x, data = as.data.frame(x))),
   by.column = FALSE, align = "right")

## result is identical to
coef(lm(y ~ x, data = z[1:4,]))
coef(lm(y ~ x, data = z[2:5,]))

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