Fix missing dates with R
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I have data on user access to a website. This log file (helpdesk log.csv) just contains the date of access, and how many accesses were counted. It would look like this:
Date hits
13-07-2011 2
14-07-2011 1
16-07-2011 3
17-07-2011 4
…
As you can see, for days with no access (like 15-07-2011 for example), there is no entry.
I wanted to draw a graph showing the number of hits over time. plotting this shows the graph below, but it’s conditional on there having been at least one hit. So it’s a bit misleading. We don’t know if there was zero hits or one.
What I plot looks like this:
2011-06-28 1
2011-06-29 2
2011-06-30 3
2011-07-01 1
2011-07-04 3
2011-07-05 3
Obviously, no data for 2011-07-02 and 2011-07-03, when I would want an entry 2011-07-02 = 0. In other words, I want this
2011-06-28 1
2011-06-29 2
2011-06-30 3
2011-07-01 1
2011-07-02 0
2011-07-03 0
2011-07-04 3
2011-07-05 3
So, I need to insert date and a value of zero for each date with no activity. There’s an easy way to do this in R.
so actind is an index vector. the first seven entries are
2011-06-28 1
2011-06-29 2
2011-06-30 3
2011-07-01 4
2011-07-02 0
2011-07-03 0
2011-07-04 5
where each row corresponds to a consecutive date, zero means no activity on that date, and a positive number is the INDEX of the element in “daycount” (the short vector) corresponding to that date.
The correct graph is this one:
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