python - Rolling difference in Pandas

Question

Does anyone know an efficient function/method such as pandas.rolling_mean, that would calculate the rolling difference of an array

This is my closest solution:

roll_diff = pd.Series(values).diff(periods=1)

However, it only calculates single-step rolling difference. Ideally the step size would be editable (i.e. difference between current time step and n last steps).

I've also written this, but for larger arrays, it is quite slow:

def roll_diff(values,step):
    diff = []
    for i in np.arange(step, len(values)-1):
        pers_window = np.arange(i-1,i-step-1,-1)
        diff.append(np.abs(values[i] - np.mean(values[pers_window])))
    diff = np.pad(diff, (0, step+1), 'constant')
    return diff

Answer 1

What about:

import pandas

x = pandas.DataFrame({
    'x_1': [0, 1, 2, 3, 0, 1, 2, 500, ],},
    index=[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7])

x['x_1'].rolling(window=2).apply(lambda x: x.iloc[1] - x.iloc[0])

in general you can replace the lambda function with your own function. Note that in this case the first item will be NaN.

Update

Defining the following:

n_steps = 2
def my_fun(x):
    return x.iloc[-1] - x.iloc[0]

x['x_1'].rolling(window=n_steps).apply(my_fun)

you can compute the differences between values at n_steps.