Here is the head of my dataset.
Year Months CPI UEL CLF
1 1948 1 23.68 2034 60230
2 1948 2 23.67 2328 NA
3 1948 3 23.50 2399 NA
4 1948 4 23.82 2386 60535
5 1948 5 24.01 2118 NA
6 1948 6 24.15 2214 NA
CPI stands for "Consumer Price Index", UEL is the "Unemployment Level", and CLF is the "Civilian Labor Force". The data is between the years 1948 and 2016. I was only given the Civilian Labor Force figures for months 1, 4, 7, and 10 of each year. I need to calculate the variables Inflation Rate and Unemployment Rate from these variables but I'm not sure how to do that in RStudio.
Actually your problem seems with ECONOMICS rather than programming in r. You have to first decide about strategies to calculate NAs in data (CLF) which can be
Thereafter you can calculate unemployment rate in r.
For calculation of inflation you can use lag/lead from dplyr.
Something like this will work, if you want to fill blanks with previous values only.
library(tidyverse)
df %>% fill(CLF, .direction = "down") %>%
mutate(inflation = paste0(formatC((CPI - lag(CPI))*100/lag(CPI), digits = 2), "%"),
unemployment_rate = paste0(formatC(UEL*100/CLF, digits = 2), "%"))
Year Months CPI UEL CLF inflation unemployment_rate
1 1948 1 23.68 2034 60230 NA% 3.4%
2 1948 2 23.67 2328 60230 -0.042% 3.9%
3 1948 3 23.50 2399 60230 -0.72% 4%
4 1948 4 23.82 2386 60535 1.4% 3.9%
5 1948 5 24.01 2118 60535 0.8% 3.5%
6 1948 6 24.15 2214 60535 0.58% 3.7%
If you want results without formatting as percentages
df %>% fill(CLF, .direction = "down") %>%
mutate(inflation = (CPI - lag(CPI))*100/lag(CPI),
unemployment_rate = UEL*100/CLF)
Year Months CPI UEL CLF inflation unemployment_rate
1 1948 1 23.68 2034 60230 NA 3.377055
2 1948 2 23.67 2328 60230 -0.04222973 3.865183
3 1948 3 23.50 2399 60230 -0.71820870 3.983065
4 1948 4 23.82 2386 60535 1.36170213 3.941521
5 1948 5 24.01 2118 60535 0.79764903 3.498802
6 1948 6 24.15 2214 60535 0.58309038 3.657388