Find Difference of Consecutive Row Values in R (Example Code)

In this article, I’ll demonstrate how to calculate the difference of consecutive rows in R.

Creation of Example Data

data(iris)                     # Load example data set
head(iris)
#   Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
# 1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa
# 2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa
# 3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2  setosa
# 4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2  setosa
# 5          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2  setosa
# 6          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4  setosa

Example: Applying diff() Function to Calculate Difference Between Rows

diff(iris$Sepal.Length)        # Get row differences
#   [1] -0.2 -0.2 -0.1  0.4  0.4 -0.8  0.4 -0.6  0.5  0.5 -0.6  0.0 -0.5  1.5 -0.1
#  [16] -0.3 -0.3  0.6 -0.6  0.3 -0.3 -0.5  0.5 -0.3  0.2  0.0  0.2  0.0 -0.5  0.1
#  [31]  0.6 -0.2  0.3 -0.6  0.1  0.5 -0.6 -0.5  0.7 -0.1 -0.5 -0.1  0.6  0.1 -0.3
#  [46]  0.3 -0.5  0.7 -0.3  2.0 -0.6  0.5 -1.4  1.0 -0.8  0.6 -1.4  1.7 -1.4 -0.2
#  [61]  0.9  0.1  0.1 -0.5  1.1 -1.1  0.2  0.4 -0.6  0.3  0.2  0.2 -0.2  0.3  0.2
#  [76]  0.2 -0.1 -0.7 -0.3 -0.2  0.0  0.3  0.2 -0.6  0.6  0.7 -0.4 -0.7 -0.1  0.0
#  [91]  0.6 -0.3 -0.8  0.6  0.1  0.0  0.5 -1.1  0.6  0.6 -0.5  1.3 -0.8  0.2  1.1
# [106] -2.7  2.4 -0.6  0.5 -0.7 -0.1  0.4 -1.1  0.1  0.6  0.1  1.2  0.0 -1.7  0.9
# [121] -1.3  2.1 -1.4  0.4  0.5 -1.0 -0.1  0.3  0.8  0.2  0.5 -1.5 -0.1 -0.2  1.6
# [136] -1.4  0.1 -0.4  0.9 -0.2  0.2 -1.1  1.0 -0.1  0.0 -0.4  0.2 -0.3 -0.3

Further Resources & Related Tutorials

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

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