Hello I am puzzled about the use or status of "partial" in R. years ago I found a little piece of code which gives the pth largest number in a vector: x<-c(5,4,7,2,6,9) n <- length(x) p<-4 sort(x,partial=n-(n-p))[n-(n-p)] This works fine, although I have tried playing around with the code and don't understand what "partial" is doing here. However, wanted to work out what was going on, so I looked for "partial in r" on t'internet and got this site:Partial apply a function, filling in some arguments. ? partial ? purrr (tidyverse.org) <https://purrr.tidyverse.org/reference/partial.html#:~:text=Source%3A%20R%2Fpartial.R%20Partial%20function%20application%20allows%20you%20to,that%20an%20argument%20can%20only%20be%20partialised%20once.> Examples: # Partial is designed to replace the use of anonymous functions for # filling in function arguments. Instead of: compact1 <- function(x) discard <https://purrr.tidyverse.org/reference/keep.html>(x, is.null) # we can write: compact2 <- partial(discard, .p = is.null) # partial() works fine with functions that do non-standard # evaluation my_long_variable <- 1:10 plot2 <- partial(plot, my_long_variable) plot2() when i tried to run the examples on this site I got error messages - R (studio) did not recognise the "partial" function here. The site did not say that I needed a particular package to run the "partial" function. Are there essentially two different things in R both described as "partial" but which are actually different entities? Thanks for any elucidation Nick Wray
Puzzled over "partial"
3 messages · Nick Wray, Andrew Simmons, Richard O'Keefe
Hello, First, your statement can be re-written as sort(x,partial=p)[p] since n - (n - p) is p. Second, you need to look at ?sort And look at section "Arguments" subsection "partial", that should have the details you're looking for. From what I understand, it guarantees that the indices of "partial" will be sorted correctly, but all others won't, so this saves time for things like "median". I hope this helps!
On Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 07:54 Nick Wray <nickmwray at gmail.com> wrote:
Hello I am puzzled about the use or status of "partial" in R. years ago I found a little piece of code which gives the pth largest number in a vector: x<-c(5,4,7,2,6,9) n <- length(x) p<-4 sort(x,partial=n-(n-p))[n-(n-p)] This works fine, although I have tried playing around with the code and don't understand what "partial" is doing here. However, wanted to work out what was going on, so I looked for "partial in r" on t'internet and got this site:Partial apply a function, filling in some arguments. ? partial ? purrr (tidyverse.org) < https://purrr.tidyverse.org/reference/partial.html#:~:text=Source%3A%20R%2Fpartial.R%20Partial%20function%20application%20allows%20you%20to,that%20an%20argument%20can%20only%20be%20partialised%20once .> Examples: # Partial is designed to replace the use of anonymous functions for # filling in function arguments. Instead of: compact1 <- function(x) discard <https://purrr.tidyverse.org/reference/keep.html>(x, is.null) # we can write: compact2 <- partial(discard, .p = is.null) # partial() works fine with functions that do non-standard # evaluation my_long_variable <- 1:10 plot2 <- partial(plot, my_long_variable) plot2() when i tried to run the examples on this site I got error messages - R (studio) did not recognise the "partial" function here. The site did not say that I needed a particular package to run the "partial" function. Are there essentially two different things in R both described as "partial" but which are actually different entities? Thanks for any elucidation Nick Wray [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
In this context, "partial" is not the name of any function or package in R. It is just the name of a parameter. And its meaning, which is specific to sort(), is spelled out in the documentation for sort:
?sort
...
If ?partial? is not ?NULL?, it is taken to contain indices of
elements of the result which are to be placed in their correct
positions in the sorted array by partial sorting. For each of the
result values in a specified position, any values smaller than
that one are guaranteed to have a smaller index in the sorted
array and any values which are greater are guaranteed to have a
bigger index in the sorted array. (This is included for
efficiency, and many of the options are not available for partial
sorting. It is only substantially more efficient if ?partial? has
a handful of elements, and a full sort is done (a Quicksort if
possible) if there are more than 10.) Names are discarded for
partial sorting.
Suppose you had the question
IF the vector x were sorted, what would its 5th element be?
You could answer that by doing
sort(x)[5[
but that's more work than you really need.
sort(x, partial=5)[5]
rearranges x to c(less.than.x.5, x.5, greater.than.x.5). This is called
partial sorting, If you wanted the quartiles, then
sort(x, partial=c(p,q,r))[c(p,q,r)]
will do the job, where p, q, r are the positions where the quartiles
would end up if complete sorting were done.
It's an efficiency hack for computing quantiles, basically.
If you are interested, you could look up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickselect
On Mon, 26 Jul 2021 at 23:54, Nick Wray <nickmwray at gmail.com> wrote:
Hello I am puzzled about the use or status of "partial" in R. years ago I found a little piece of code which gives the pth largest number in a vector: x<-c(5,4,7,2,6,9) n <- length(x) p<-4 sort(x,partial=n-(n-p))[n-(n-p)] This works fine, although I have tried playing around with the code and don't understand what "partial" is doing here. However, wanted to work out what was going on, so I looked for "partial in r" on t'internet and got this site:Partial apply a function, filling in some arguments. ? partial ? purrr (tidyverse.org) <https://purrr.tidyverse.org/reference/partial.html#:~:text=Source%3A%20R%2Fpartial.R%20Partial%20function%20application%20allows%20you%20to,that%20an%20argument%20can%20only%20be%20partialised%20once.> Examples: # Partial is designed to replace the use of anonymous functions for # filling in function arguments. Instead of: compact1 <- function(x) discard <https://purrr.tidyverse.org/reference/keep.html>(x, is.null) # we can write: compact2 <- partial(discard, .p = is.null) # partial() works fine with functions that do non-standard # evaluation my_long_variable <- 1:10 plot2 <- partial(plot, my_long_variable) plot2() when i tried to run the examples on this site I got error messages - R (studio) did not recognise the "partial" function here. The site did not say that I needed a particular package to run the "partial" function. Are there essentially two different things in R both described as "partial" but which are actually different entities? Thanks for any elucidation Nick Wray [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.