Something like

sliding = function(df, n, f)
    ldply(1:(nrow(df) - n + 1), function(k)
        f(df[k:(k + n - 1), ])
    )

That would be used like

> df
  n         a
1 1 0.8021891
2 2 0.9446330
...

> sliding(df, 2, function(df) with(df,
+     data.frame(n = n[1], a = a[1], b = sum(n - a))
+ ))
  n         a        b
1 1 0.8021891 1.253178
...

Except straight inside ddply, so that I could get the nice syntactic sugar that comes with it?

r plyr
Edit
Report