I have a large dataset with three different variables: ID, admission date, discharge date.
ID Admit_Date Discharge_date
1 2015-1-1 2015-3-9
2 2015-1-9 2015-4-10
2 2015-8-10 2015-11-2
Currently the dataset is in long format and I want to make it a wide dataset with each row corresponding to one ID. Since there are hundreds of different dates, I do not want the values to be column names as that would result in potentially hundreds of columns. I want there to be multiple admit/discharge columns so that it shows like "admit_date_1", "discharge_date_1", "admit_date_2", etc.
ID Admit_Date_1 Discharge_date_1 Admit_Date_2 Discharge_date_2
1 2015-1-1 2015-3-9 NA NA
2 2015-1-9 2015-4-10 2015-8-10 2015-11-2
I have tried using the dcast and melt functions in R but cannot get it to look like this above. Any help or guidance is appreciated! -J