Talbot, Try this:
PartMax <- function(x, breaks) { breaks <- c(breaks, length(x) + 1) sapply(seq(length(breaks) - 1), function(i) max(x[breaks[i]:(breaks[i + 1] - 1)], na.rm = TRUE)) } > PartMax(c(1,4,2,6,7,5),c(1,4,5)) [1] 4 6 7 > PartMax(6:1,c(1,4,5)) [1] 6 3 2 I would not go to extremes in trying to avoid *apply functions. In many cases, it will provide sufficient performance and enable the code to be quite readable. Short of coding a new R function in a lower level language like C, you are not likely to get more performance and then you have to balance the time it takes to improve the code, versus simply getting the job done reliably and moving on. If you have very large initial vectors, with a large number of sub-partitions and will be doing this often, then it might make sense to spend the time to profile the code and fine tune it. But I would first get a sense of the actual running time on larger vectors before making that decision. HTH, Marc Talbot Katz wrote: > Hi Marc. > > Thank you for the swift response! I should have explained more about the partitions, I hoped it would be clear from the code. I am supplying an index vector to create the partitions. In my original example of v = c(1,4,2,6,7,5) with v1 = v[1:3], v2 = v[4], v3 = v[5:6], I would specify this partition with the index vector c(1,4,5), giving the first indices of each subvector; the implicit assumption is that the last index of partition i is the first index of partition (i + 1) minus 1, except for the last partition, which ends at the end of the original vector being partitioned. Here are the results of this example from the two functions I defined: > >> partiCmax(c(1,4,2,6,7,5),c(1,4,5)) > [1] 4 6 7 >> partiMax(c(1,4,2,6,7,5),c(1,4,5)) > [1] 4 6 7 > > > However, if I use an example in which the maxima are not > non-decreasing: > >> partiCmax(6:1,c(1,4,5)) > [1] 6 6 6 >> partiMax(6:1,c(1,4,5)) > [1] 6 3 2 > > partiMax gives the sought result, but partiCmax doesn't. Your > function >is like a cleaner version of partiMax, using the fact that you have the >partition in a list. This begs the question of what is the most >efficient way to create the partition list from the original vector and >the index vector that specifies the partition. But I am also wondering >whether we can find something even more efficient than the use of the >apply family of functions. Thanks! <snip> ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list 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.