r - Cumulative sum until maximum reached, then repeat from zero in the next row

Question

I feel like this is a fairly easy question, but for the life of me I can't seem to find the answer. I have a fairly standard dataframe, and what I am trying to do is sum the a column of values until they reach some value (either that exact value or greater than it), at which point it drops a 1 into a new column (labelled keep) and restarts the summing at 0.

I have a column of minutes, the differences between the minutes, a keep column, and a cumulative sum column (the example I am using is much cleaner than the actual full dataset)

 minutes     difference     keep     difference_sum
 1052991158       0          0            0
 1052991338      180         0            180
 1052991518      180         0            360
 1052991698      180         0            540
 1052991878      180         0            720
 1052992058      180         0            900
 1052992238      180         0            1080
 1052992418      180         0            1260
 1052992598      180         0            1440
 1052992778      180         0            1620
 1052992958      180         0            1800

The difference sum column was calculated with the code

caribou.sub$difference_sum<-cumsum(difference)

What I would like to do is run the above code with the condition that, when the summed value reaches either 1470 or any number greater than that it puts a 1 in the keep column and then restarts summing afterwards, and continues running throughout the dataset.

Thanks in advance, and if you need any more information let me know.

Ayden

Answer 1

I think this is best done with a for loop, can't think of a function that could do so out of the box. The following should do what you want (if I understand you correctly).

current.sum <- 0
for (c in 1:nrow(caribou.sub)) {
    current.sum <- current.sum + caribou.sub[c, "difference"]
    carribou.sub[c, "difference_sum"] <- current.sum
    if (current.sum >= 1470) {
        caribou.sub[c, "keep"] <- 1
        current.sum <- 0
    }
}

Feel free to comment if it does not exactly what you want. But as pointed out by alexwhan, your description is not completely clear.