Check if any dates within an Interval are within any of the dates in another Interval

Question

I have 2 intervals of dates, and I want to see if any of the dates in interval_A are within interval_B . I am ideally looking for a dplyr solution.

The data

library(lubridate)

interval_A <- 
new("Interval", .Data = c(20822400, 10454400, 42508800, 18662400, 
12355200, 16243200, 10195200, 14774400, 37324800, 31276800, 27734400, 
62985600, 15724800, 32054400, 21427200), start = structure(c(94953600, 
131328000, 240451200, 294278400, 334454400, 449193600, 493344000, 
546739200, 575596800, 760320000, 930700800, 1088553600, 1481673600, 
1513123200, 1647388800), tzone = "UTC", class = c("POSIXct", 
"POSIXt")), tzone = "UTC")


interval_B <- 
new("Interval", .Data = c(41904000, 15724800, 42163200, 20995200, 
21168000, 47347200, 5184000), start = structure(c(120960000, 
315532800, 362793600, 646790400, 983404800, 1196467200, 1580515200
), tzone = "UTC", class = c("POSIXct", "POSIXt")), tzone = "UTC")


 interval_A
 [1] 1973-01-04 UTC--1973-09-02 UTC 1974-03-01 UTC--1974-06-30 UTC 1977-08-15 UTC--1978-12-20 UTC
 [4] 1979-04-30 UTC--1979-12-02 UTC 1980-08-07 UTC--1980-12-28 UTC 1984-03-27 UTC--1984-10-01 UTC
 [7] 1985-08-20 UTC--1985-12-16 UTC 1987-04-30 UTC--1987-10-18 UTC 1988-03-29 UTC--1989-06-04 UTC
[10] 1994-02-04 UTC--1995-02-01 UTC 1999-06-30 UTC--2000-05-16 UTC 2004-06-30 UTC--2006-06-29 UTC
[13] 2016-12-14 UTC--2017-06-14 UTC 2017-12-13 UTC--2018-12-19 UTC 2022-03-16 UTC--2022-11-19 UTC


interval_B
[1] 1973-11-01 UTC--1975-03-01 UTC 1980-01-01 UTC--1980-07-01 UTC 1981-07-01 UTC--1982-11-01 UTC
[4] 1990-07-01 UTC--1991-03-01 UTC 2001-03-01 UTC--2001-11-01 UTC 2007-12-01 UTC--2009-06-01 UTC
[7] 2020-02-01 UTC--2020-04-01 UTC

I was hoping this was going to simple using the following code, but this throws an error:

as.list(interval_A) %within% as.list(interval_B)

Error in as.list(interval_A) %within% as.list(interval_B) : 
  No %within% method with signature a = list,  b = list

Another solution might be to expand out every date in interval_A and check it against interval_B , but I was hoping there might be an easier solution (and I am not sure if there is a simple way to convert interval_A into a vector of dates)

Thanks for any thoughts!

Answer 1

Using sapply() to test each element from interval_A against all elements of interval_B :

library(lubridate)

A_in_B <- sapply(interval_A, \(x) any(x %within% interval_B))
A_in_B
# FALSE  TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE

interval_A[A_in_B]
# 1974-03-01 UTC--1974-06-30 UTC

Or, using tidyverse to create a dataframe with results:

library(lubridate)
library(tibble)
library(purrr)

tibble(
  interval_A,
  in_interval_B = map_lgl(interval_A, ~ any(.x %within% interval_B))
)

# A tibble: 15 × 2
   interval_A                     in_interval_B
   <Interval>                     <lgl>        
 1 1973-01-04 UTC--1973-09-02 UTC FALSE        
 2 1974-03-01 UTC--1974-06-30 UTC TRUE         
 3 1977-08-15 UTC--1978-12-20 UTC FALSE        
 4 1979-04-30 UTC--1979-12-02 UTC FALSE        
 5 1980-08-07 UTC--1980-12-28 UTC FALSE        
 6 1984-03-27 UTC--1984-10-01 UTC FALSE        
 7 1985-08-20 UTC--1985-12-16 UTC FALSE        
 8 1987-04-30 UTC--1987-10-18 UTC FALSE        
 9 1988-03-29 UTC--1989-06-04 UTC FALSE        
10 1994-02-04 UTC--1995-02-01 UTC FALSE        
11 1999-06-30 UTC--2000-05-16 UTC FALSE        
12 2004-06-30 UTC--2006-06-29 UTC FALSE        
13 2016-12-14 UTC--2017-06-14 UTC FALSE        
14 2017-12-13 UTC--2018-12-19 UTC FALSE        
15 2022-03-16 UTC--2022-11-19 UTC FALSE