I have a data.table:

```
require(data.table)

set.seed(1)
data <- data.table(time = c(1:3, 1:4),
                   groups = c(rep(c("b", "a"), c(3, 4))),
                   value = rnorm(7))

data
#    groups time      value
# 1:      b    1 -0.6264538
# 2:      b    2  0.1836433
# 3:      b    3 -0.8356286
# 4:      a    1  1.5952808
# 5:      a    2  0.3295078
# 6:      a    3 -0.8204684
# 7:      a    4  0.4874291

```

I want to compute a lagged version of the "value" column, *within* each level of "groups".

The result should look like

```
#   groups time      value  lag.value
# 1      a    1  1.5952808         NA
# 2      a    2  0.3295078  1.5952808
# 3      a    3 -0.8204684  0.3295078
# 4      a    4  0.4874291 -0.8204684
# 5      b    1 -0.6264538         NA
# 6      b    2  0.1836433 -0.6264538
# 7      b    3 -0.8356286  0.1836433

```

I have tried to use `lag` directly:

```
data$lag.value <- lag(data$value) 

```

...which clearly wouldn't work.

I have also tried:

```
unlist(tapply(data$value, data$groups, lag))
 a1         a2         a3         a4         b1         b2         b3 
 NA -0.1162932  0.4420753  2.1505440         NA  0.5894583 -0.2890288 

```

Which is almost what I want. However the vector generated is ordered differently from the ordering in the data.table which is problematic.

What is the most efficient way to do this in base R, plyr, dplyr, and data.table?