Calculating log returns over columns of a data frame + store the results in a new data frame

Question

My data frame contains 22 columns: "DATE", "INDEX" and S1, S2, S3 ... S20. There are over 4322 rows. I want to calculate log returns and store the results in a data frame. That should give me 4321 rows.

I run this code, but I am sure there is a much more elegant way to do the calculation in a short way.

# count the sum of rows in order to make the following formula work appropriately - (n-1)
n <- nrow(df)

# calculating the log returns (natural logarithm), of INDEX and S1-20
LogRet_INDEX <- log(df$INDEX[2:n])-log(df$INDEX[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S1 <- log(df$S1[2:n])-log(df$S1[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S2 <- log(df$S2[2:n])-log(df$S2[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S3 <- log(df$S3[2:n])-log(df$S3[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S4 <- log(df$S4[2:n])-log(df$S4[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S5 <- log(df$S5[2:n])-log(df$S5[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S6 <- log(df$S6[2:n])-log(df$S6[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S7 <- log(df$S7[2:n])-log(df$S7[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S8 <- log(df$S8[2:n])-log(df$S7[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S9 <- log(df$S9[2:n])-log(df$S8[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S10 <- log(df$S10[2:n])-log(df$S10[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S11 <- log(df$S11[2:n])-log(df$S11[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S12 <- log(df$S12[2:n])-log(df$S12[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S13 <- log(df$S13[2:n])-log(df$S13[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S14 <- log(df$S14[2:n])-log(df$S14[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S15 <- log(df$S15[2:n])-log(df$S15[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S16 <- log(df$S16[2:n])-log(df$S16[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S17 <- log(df$S17[2:n])-log(df$S17[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S18 <- log(df$S18[2:n])-log(df$S18[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S19 <- log(df$S19[2:n])-log(df$S19[1:(n-1)])
LogRet_S20 <- log(df$S20[2:n])-log(df$S20[1:(n-1)])

# adding the results from the previous calculation (log returns) to a data frame
LogRet_df <- data.frame(LogRet_INDEX, LogRet_S1, LogRet_S2, LogRet_S3, LogRet_S4, LogRet_S5, LogRet_S6, LogRet_S7, LogRet_S8, LogRet_S9, LogRet_S10, LogRet_S11, LogRet_S12, LogRet_S13, LogRet_S14, LogRet_S15, LogRet_S16, LogRet_S17, LogRet_S18, LogRet_S19, LogRet_S20)

Is there a possibility to make this code shorter? Maybe some kind of loop or using a for argument? Since I am quite new to R, I try to improve my knowledge.

Any kind of help is highly appreciated!

Answer 1

You can use sapply to apply a function to each column of the data.frame.

What the code below does, is 1) take columns 2 to 22 from the data frame called df. 2) for each of this columns, calculate logarithm of the respective column and then calculate the difference between two neighboring rows. 3) when done, convert it to data.frame called df2

df2 <- as.data.frame(sapply(df[2:22], function(x) diff(log(x))))