Determine season from Date using lubridate in R

Question

I have a very big dataset with a DateTime Column containing POSIXct-Values. I need to determine the season (Winter - Summer) based on the DateTime column. I've created a function which works fine on a small dataset, but crashes when I use it on the large one. Can anybody see my mistake?

I've created 4 functions:

• 3 subfunctions so that I can do logical comparisons and selection using *apply functions
• 1 function to determine the season

Here are thefunctions:

require(lubridate)

# function for logical comparison (to be used in *apply)
greaterOrEqual <- function(x,y){
  ifelse(x >= y,T,F)
}

# function for logical comparison (to be used in *apply)
less <- function(x,y){
  ifelse(x < y,T,F)
}

# function for logical comparison (to be used in *apply)
selFromLogic <- function(VecLogic,VecValue){
  VecValue[VecLogic]
}

# Main Function to determine the season
getTwoSeasons <- function(input.date) {
  Winter1Start <- as.POSIXct("2000-01-01 00:00:00", tz = "UTC")
  Winter1End <- as.POSIXct("2000-04-15 23:59:59", tz = "UTC")

  SummerStart <- Winter1End + 1
  SummerEnd <- as.POSIXct("2000-10-15 23:59:59", tz = "UTC")

  Winter2Start <- SummerEnd + 1
  Winter2End <- as.POSIXct("2000-12-31 00:00:00", tz = "UTC")

  year(input.date) <- year(Winter1Start)
  attr(input.date, "tzone") <- attr(Winter1Start, "tzone")

  SeasonStart <- c(Winter1Start,SummerStart,Winter2Start)
  SeasonsEnd <- c(Winter1End,SummerEnd,Winter2End)
  Season_names <- as.factor(c("WinterHalfYear","SummerHalfYear","WinterHalfYear"))

  Season_select <- sapply(SeasonStart, greaterOrEqual, x = input.date) & sapply(SeasonsEnd, less, x = input.date)
  Season_return <- apply(Season_select,MARGIN = 1,selFromLogic,VecValue = Season_names)

  return(Season_return)
}

And here's a way to test the function:

dates <- Sys.time() + seq(0,10000,10)
getTwoSeasons(dates)

I would be thankful for any help, this is driving me crazy!

Answer 1

And if you're interested in getting back four seasons, here's code to do that:

library(lubridate)
getSeason <- function(input.date){
  numeric.date <- 100*month(input.date)+day(input.date)
  ## input Seasons upper limits in the form MMDD in the "break =" option:
  cuts <- base::cut(numeric.date, breaks = c(0,319,0620,0921,1220,1231)) 
  # rename the resulting groups (could've been done within cut(...levels=) if "Winter" wasn't double
  levels(cuts) <- c("Winter","Spring","Summer","Fall","Winter")
  return(cuts)
}

Unit Test:

getSeason(as.POSIXct("2016-01-01 12:00:00")+(0:365)*(60*60*24))

Answer 2

For completeness, worth noting that lubridate now has a quarter (and a semester) function. quarter splits the year into fourths and semester into halves:

library(lubridate)

quarter(x, with_year = FALSE, fiscal_start = 1)
semester(x, with_year = FALSE)

For more, see: https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/lubridate/versions/1.7.4/topics/quarter

Answer 3

I packaged @Lars Arne Jordanger's much more elegant approach into a function:

getTwoSeasons <- function(input.date){
  numeric.date <- 100*month(input.date)+day(input.date)
  ## input Seasons upper limits in the form MMDD in the "break =" option:
  cuts <- base::cut(numeric.date, breaks = c(0,415,1015,1231)) 
  # rename the resulting groups (could've been done within cut(...levels=) if "Winter" wasn't double
  levels(cuts) <- c("Winter", "Summer","Winter")
  return(cuts)
}

Testing it on some sample data seems to work fine:

getTwoSeasons(as.POSIXct("2016-01-01 12:00:00")+(0:365)*(60*60*24))