time series - Basic lag in R vector/dataframe

Question

Will most likely expose that I am new to R, but in SPSS, running lags is very easy. Obviously this is user error, but what I am missing?

x <- sample(c(1:9), 10, replace = T)
y <- lag(x, 1)
ds <- cbind(x, y)
ds

Results in:

      x y
 [1,] 4 4
 [2,] 6 6
 [3,] 3 3
 [4,] 4 4
 [5,] 3 3
 [6,] 5 5
 [7,] 8 8
 [8,] 9 9
 [9,] 3 3
[10,] 7 7

I figured I would see:

     x y
 [1,] 4 
 [2,] 6 4
 [3,] 3 6
 [4,] 4 3
 [5,] 3 4
 [6,] 5 3
 [7,] 8 5
 [8,] 9 8
 [9,] 3 9
[10,] 7 3

Any guidance will be much appreciated.

Answer 1

I had the same problem, but I didn't want to use zoo or xts, so I wrote a simple lag function for data frames:

lagpad <- function(x, k) {
  if (k>0) {
    return (c(rep(NA, k), x)[1 : length(x)] );
  }
  else {
    return (c(x[(-k+1) : length(x)], rep(NA, -k)));
  }
}

This can lag forward or backwards:

x<-1:3;
(cbind(x, lagpad(x, 1), lagpad(x,-1)))
     x      
[1,] 1 NA  2
[2,] 2  1  3
[3,] 3  2 NA