datetime - Aggregate Daily Data to Month/Year intervals

Question

I don't often have to work with dates in R, but I imagine this is fairly easy. I have a column that represents a date in a dataframe. I simply want to create a new dataframe that summarizes a 2nd column by Month/Year using the date. What is the best approach?

I want a second dataframe so I can feed it to a plot.

Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: For reference:

> str(temp)
'data.frame':   215746 obs. of  2 variables:
 $ date  : POSIXct, format: "2011-02-01" "2011-02-01" "2011-02-01" ...
 $ amount: num  1.67 83.55 24.4 21.99 98.88 ...

> head(temp)
        date amount
1 2011-02-01  1.670
2 2011-02-01 83.550
3 2011-02-01 24.400
4 2011-02-01 21.990
5 2011-02-03 98.882
6 2011-02-03 24.900

Answer 1

I'd do it with lubridate and plyr, rounding dates down to the nearest month to make them easier to plot:

library(lubridate)
df <- data.frame(
  date = today() + days(1:300),
  x = runif(300)
)
df$my <- floor_date(df$date, "month")

library(plyr)
ddply(df, "my", summarise, x = mean(x))