[python] Pandas: rolling mean by time interval

I found that user2689410 code broke when I tried with window='1M' as the delta on business month threw this error:

AttributeError: 'MonthEnd' object has no attribute 'delta'

I added the option to pass directly a relative time delta, so you can do similar things for user defined periods.

Thanks for the pointers, here's my attempt - hope it's of use.

def rolling_mean(data, window, min_periods=1, center=False):
""" Function that computes a rolling mean
Reference:
    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15771472/pandas-rolling-mean-by-time-interval

Parameters
----------
data : DataFrame or Series
       If a DataFrame is passed, the rolling_mean is computed for all columns.
window : int, string, Timedelta or Relativedelta
         int - number of observations used for calculating the statistic,
               as defined by the function pd.rolling_mean()
         string - must be a frequency string, e.g. '90S'. This is
                  internally converted into a DateOffset object, and then
                  Timedelta representing the window size.
         Timedelta / Relativedelta - Can directly pass a timedeltas.
min_periods : int
              Minimum number of observations in window required to have a value.
center : bool
         Point around which to 'center' the slicing.

Returns
-------
Series or DataFrame, if more than one column
"""
def f(x, time_increment):
    """Function to apply that actually computes the rolling mean
    :param x:
    :return:
    """
    if not center:
        # adding a microsecond because when slicing with labels start
        # and endpoint are inclusive
        start_date = x - time_increment + timedelta(0, 0, 1)
        end_date = x
    else:
        start_date = x - time_increment/2 + timedelta(0, 0, 1)
        end_date = x + time_increment/2
    # Select the date index from the
    dslice = col[start_date:end_date]

    if dslice.size < min_periods:
        return np.nan
    else:
        return dslice.mean()

data = DataFrame(data.copy())
dfout = DataFrame()
if isinstance(window, int):
    dfout = pd.rolling_mean(data, window, min_periods=min_periods, center=center)

elif isinstance(window, basestring):
    time_delta = pd.datetools.to_offset(window).delta
    idx = Series(data.index.to_pydatetime(), index=data.index)
    for colname, col in data.iteritems():
        result = idx.apply(lambda x: f(x, time_delta))
        result.name = colname
        dfout = dfout.join(result, how='outer')

elif isinstance(window, (timedelta, relativedelta)):
    time_delta = window
    idx = Series(data.index.to_pydatetime(), index=data.index)
    for colname, col in data.iteritems():
        result = idx.apply(lambda x: f(x, time_delta))
        result.name = colname
        dfout = dfout.join(result, how='outer')

if dfout.columns.size == 1:
    dfout = dfout.ix[:, 0]
return dfout

And the example with a 3 day time window to calculate the mean:

from pandas import Series, DataFrame
import pandas as pd
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
import numpy as np
from dateutil.relativedelta import relativedelta

idx = [datetime(2011, 2, 7, 0, 0),
           datetime(2011, 2, 7, 0, 1),
           datetime(2011, 2, 8, 0, 1, 30),
           datetime(2011, 2, 9, 0, 2),
           datetime(2011, 2, 10, 0, 4),
           datetime(2011, 2, 11, 0, 5),
           datetime(2011, 2, 12, 0, 5, 10),
           datetime(2011, 2, 12, 0, 6),
           datetime(2011, 2, 13, 0, 8),
           datetime(2011, 2, 14, 0, 9)]
idx = pd.Index(idx)
vals = np.arange(len(idx)).astype(float)
s = Series(vals, index=idx)
# Now try by passing the 3 days as a relative time delta directly.
rm = rolling_mean(s, window=relativedelta(days=3))
>>> rm
Out[2]: 
2011-02-07 00:00:00    0.0
2011-02-07 00:01:00    0.5
2011-02-08 00:01:30    1.0
2011-02-09 00:02:00    1.5
2011-02-10 00:04:00    3.0
2011-02-11 00:05:00    4.0
2011-02-12 00:05:10    5.0
2011-02-12 00:06:00    5.5
2011-02-13 00:08:00    6.5
2011-02-14 00:09:00    7.5
Name: 0, dtype: float64