Making routine faster by using apply instead of for-loop
-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org
[mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Etienne Stockhausen
Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 10:59 AM
To: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: [R] Making routine faster by using apply instead of for-loop
Hey everybody,
I have a small problem with a routine, which prepares some data for
plotting.
I've made a small example:
c=10
mat=data.frame(matrix(1:(c*c),c,c))
row.names(mat)=seq(c,1,length=c)
names(mat)=c(seq(2,c,length=c/2),seq(c,2,length=c/2))
v=as.numeric(row.names(mat))
w=as.numeric(names(mat))
for(i in 1:c)
{ for(j in 1:c)
{
if(v[j]+w[i]<=c)(mat[i,j]=NA)
}}
This produces exactly the data I need to go on, but if I increase the
constant c ,to for instance 500 , it takes a very long time
to set the NA's.
The first problem is that random (element-by-element)
access to a data.frame is much slower than the equivalent
access to a matrix. Rewriting your code a bit to
use a matrix speeds up the c=500 case by a factor of 750.
f0 <- function (c = 10) {
mat = matrix(1:(c * c), c, c)
rownames(mat) = seq(c, 1, length = c)
colnames(mat) = c(seq(2, c, length = c/2), seq(c, 2, length = c/2))
v = as.numeric(rownames(mat))
w = as.numeric(colnames(mat))
for (i in 1:c) {
for (j in 1:c) {
if (v[j] + w[i] <= c) {
mat[i, j] = NA
}
}
}
mat
}
Rewriting that to insert the NA's one operation speeds it up by
another factor of 10 (in the c=500 case)
f1 <- function (c = 10) {
v <- seq(c, 1, length = c)
w <- c(seq(2, c, length = c/2), seq(c, 2, length = c/2))
mat <- matrix(1:(c * c), nrow = c, ncol = c, dimnames = list(v,
w))
mat[outer(w, v, `+`) <= c] <- NA
mat
}
If you really want a matrix, pass the output of these functions
into data.frame (with check.names=FALSE since the column
names are not considered legal on data.frame: the contain
duplicates and look numeric).
By the way, it is generally a bad idea to use apply() on
a data.frame. It is meant for matrices.
Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com
I've heard there is a much faster way to set the NA's using the command apply( ), but I don't know how. I'm looking forward for any ideas or hints, that might help me. Best regards Etienne
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