Calculate Difference Between Consecutive Rows in R (Example)

In this R programming tutorial you’ll learn how to find the difference of consecutive row values.

The article will consist of the following contents:

Let’s dig in…

Creation of Example Data

The first step is to create some example data:

data <- data.frame(x1 = c(1, 5, 3, 5, 2),    # Create example data frame
                   x2 = letters[1:5])
data                                         # Print example data frame

Have a look at the table that got returned after running the previous R programming syntax. It shows that the example data consists of five rows and two columns. The variable x1 has the numeric class and the variable x2 has the character class.

Example: Get Difference Between Row Values Using diff() Function

In this example, I’ll explain how to compute the difference between subsequent rows in a data frame column.

For this task, we can apply the diff function to a particular data frame column (i.e. x1):

diff_x1 <- diff(data$x1)                     # Apply diff function
diff_x1                                      # Return row differences
# [1]  4 -2  2 -3

The previous output shows the result after subtracting subsequent row values.

Video, Further Resources & Summary

Do you need further explanations on the R codes of this page? Then I recommend having a look at the following video on my YouTube channel. In the video, I show the R syntax of this article.

In addition, you might want to have a look at some of the other posts on my website:

• Get Difference Between Dates in Years
• diff Function in R
• Difference Between Single & Double Square Brackets
• Find Common Rows Between Two Data Frames
• Introduction to R Programming

In this R tutorial you have learned how to calculate the difference of consecutive rows. In case you have additional questions and/or comments, kindly let me know in the comments section below.