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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T20:03:34+00:00

I would like to be able to add the difference and percent change to

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I would like to be able to add the difference and percent change to every column in a dataframe.

I’m able to get as far as melting the data and performing the calculations, but I can’t figure out how to cast or reshape it back together. I also have a sneaking suspicion that this is easily accomplished with plyr, but the n-1 rows returned by diff() gives me problems.

Using an included dataset:

library(plyr)
library(quantmod)
head(longley)

     GNP.deflator     GNP Unemployed Armed.Forces Population Year Employed
1947         83.0 234.289      235.6        159.0    107.608 1947   60.323
1948         88.5 259.426      232.5        145.6    108.632 1948   61.122
1949         88.2 258.054      368.2        161.6    109.773 1949   60.171
1950         89.5 284.599      335.1        165.0    110.929 1950   61.187
1951         96.2 328.975      209.9        309.9    112.075 1951   63.221
1952         98.1 346.999      193.2        359.4    113.270 1952   63.639

longley.m <- melt(longley, id="Year")
longley.m <- ddply(longley.m, .(variable), transform, valdiff=diff(c(NA, value)), valdelt=Delt(value))

head(longley.m)

  Year     variable value valdiff Delt.1.arithmetic
1 1947 GNP.deflator  83.0      NA                NA
2 1948 GNP.deflator  88.5     5.5       0.066265060
3 1949 GNP.deflator  88.2    -0.3      -0.003389831
4 1950 GNP.deflator  89.5     1.3       0.014739229
5 1951 GNP.deflator  96.2     6.7       0.074860335
6 1952 GNP.deflator  98.1     1.9       0.019750520

(I don’t know why Delt makes it’s own column name, but I’ve given up on that)

Now, I can cast(longley.m, Year ~ variable) to get back to the original dataset, but I want to be able to have the difference and percent change for each variable in a different column without performing the calculation manually on each variable and then rbinding it back together. I’m pretty confident I’ve tried every variation of cast to no avail…

Update:
Joran solved the Delt column naming issue: coerce it with as.vector!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’d likely approach this more like @joran.

    But if you want to continue along the path you were on, you could use reshape() from base R to complete the journey:

    # Your code
library(plyr)
library(quantmod)
library(reshape)
head(longley)
longley.m <- melt(longley, id="Year")

# My addition
longley.m <- ddply(longley.m, .(variable), transform, 
                   valdiff = diff(c(NA, value)), 
                   valdelt = as.vector(Delt(value)))
reshape(longley.m, idvar="Year", timevar="variable", direction="wide")
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