Calculating Age in R

A few months back I wrote some code to calculate age from a date of birth and arbitrary end date. It is not a real tricky task, but it is certainly one that comes up often when doing research on individual-level data.

I was a bit surprised to only find bits and pieces of code and advice on how to best go about this task. After reading through some old R-help and Stack Overflow responses on various ways to do date math in R, this is the function I wrote ¹:

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age_calc <- function(dob, enddate=Sys.Date(), units='months'){
  if (!inherits(dob, "Date") | !inherits(enddate, "Date"))
    stop("Both dob and enddate must be Date class objects")
  start <- as.POSIXlt(dob)
  end <- as.POSIXlt(enddate)
  
  years <- end$year - start$year
  if(units=='years'){
    result <- ifelse((end$mon < start$mon) | 
                      ((end$mon == start$mon) & (end$mday < start$mday)),
                      years - 1, years)    
  }else if(units=='months'){
    months <- (years-1) * 12
    result <- months + start$mon
  }else if(units=='days'){
    result <- difftime(end, start, units='days')
  }else{
    stop("Unrecognized units. Please choose years, months, or days.")
  }
  return(result)
}

A few notes on proper usage and the choices I made in writing this function:

• The parameters dob and enddate expect data that is already in one of the various classes that minimally inherits the base class Date.
• This function takes advantage of the way that R treats vectors, so both dob and enddate can be a single or multi-element vector. For example enddate is a single date, as is the default, then the function will return a vector that calculates the difference between dob and that single date for each element in dob. If dob and enddate are both vectors with n>1, then the returned vector will contain the element-wise difference between dob and enddate. When the vectors are of different sizes, the shorter vector will be repeated over until it reaches the same length as the longer vector. This is known as recycling, and it is the default behavior in R.
• This function always returns an integer. Calculating age in years will never return, say, 26.2. Instead, it assumes that the correct behavior for age calculations is something like a floor function. For examle, the function will only return 27 if enddate is minimally your 27th birthday. Up until that day you are considered 26. The same is true for age in months.

This is probably the first custom function in almost 3 years using R that I wrote to be truly generalizable. I was inspired by three factors. First, this is a truly frequent task that I will have to apply to many data sets in the future that I don’t want to have to revisit. Second, a professional acquaintance, Jared Knowles, is putting together a CRAN package with various convenience functions for folks who are new to R and using it to analyze education data ². This seemed like an appropriate addition to that package, so I wanted to write it to that standard. In fact, it was my first (and to date, only) submitted and accepted pull request on Github. Third, it is a tiny, simple function so it was easy to wrap my head around and write it well. I will let you be the judge of my success or failure ³.