> -----Original Message----- > From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org > [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Etienne Stockhausen > Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 10:59 AM > To: r-help@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 > > ______________________________________________ > 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. > ______________________________________________ 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.