Hello,
I am trying to update a package for the upcoming release of R, and my unit
tests are affected by the change in the sample. I understand that to reproduce
the old sampling, I need to set sample.kind=“Rounding” in RNGkind or set.seed.
But I am confused by the behavior of the sample.kind argument in set.seed, as
it doesn’t seem to change my results.
In particular, I was trying to understand what happens if you make a call to
set.seed within a function to the global environment. So I set up a test as
follows:
###Test set.seed
f<-function(n,sample.kind){ #="Rounding" or "Rejection"
cat("RNG at beginning\n")
print(RNGkind())
# RNGkind(sample.kind=sample.kind)
# cat("RNG at after set\n")
# print(RNGkind())
set.seed(23,sample.kind=sample.kind)
cat("RNG at after set seed\n")
print(RNGkind())
sample(1:400000,size=n,replace=TRUE)
}
RNGkind(sample.kind="Rejection”)
print(RNGkind())
n<-1000000
y<-f(n,"Rounding”)
print(RNGkind())
y2<-f(n,"Rejection”)
print(RNGkind())
all(y==y2)
However, it didn’t do anything:
> RNGkind(sample.kind="Rejection")
> print(RNGkind())
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rejection"
> n<-1000000
> y<-f(n,"Rounding")
RNG at beginning
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rejection"
RNG at after set seed
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rejection"
Warning message:
In set.seed(23, sample.kind = sample.kind) :
non-uniform 'Rounding' sampler used
> print(RNGkind())
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rejection"
> y2<-f(n,"Rejection")
RNG at beginning
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rejection"
RNG at after set seed
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rejection"
> print(RNGkind())
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rejection"
> all(y==y2)
[1] TRUE
If I run the same test with calls to RNGkind, however, it does change the
method (and I discovered in answer to my question, it appears to change the
global method, which is an unfortunate fact for what I am trying to do).
###Test RNGkind
f<-function(n,sample.kind){ #="Rounding" or "Rejection"
cat("RNG at beginning\n")
print(RNGkind())
RNGkind(sample.kind=sample.kind)
cat("RNG at after set\n")
print(RNGkind())
set.seed(23)
cat("RNG at after set seed\n")
print(RNGkind())
sample(1:400000,size=n,replace=TRUE)
}
RNGkind(sample.kind="Rejection”)
print(RNGkind())
n<-1000000
y<-f(n,"Rounding”)
print(RNGkind())
y2<-f(n,"Rejection”)
print(RNGkind())
all(y==y2)
> RNGkind(sample.kind="Rejection")
> print(RNGkind())
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rejection"
> n<-1000000
> y<-f(n,"Rounding")
RNG at beginning
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rejection"
RNG at after set
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rounding"
RNG at after set seed
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rounding"
Warning message:
In RNGkind(sample.kind = sample.kind) : non-uniform 'Rounding' sampler used
> print(RNGkind())
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rounding"
> y2<-f(n,"Rejection")
RNG at beginning
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rounding"
RNG at after set
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rejection"
RNG at after set seed
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rejection"
> print(RNGkind())
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion" "Rejection"
> all(y==y2)
[1] FALSE
So clearly I should use RNGkind to change it, but what is the argument actually
doing in set.seed?
Thanks,
Elizabeth Purdom
> sessionInfo()
R version 3.6.0 alpha (2019-04-09 r76363)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X El Capitan 10.11.6
Matrix products: default
BLAS:
/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.6/Resources/lib/libRblas.0.dylib
LAPACK:
/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.6/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib
locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] BiocManager_1.30.4 compiler_3.6.0 tools_3.6.0
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