Using by in parallel in R - r

Question

I am a noob R programmer. I have written a code that needs to apply a function to a data frame split by factors. The data frame in itself contains about 1 million 324961 observations with 64376 factors in the variable that we use to slice the dataframe.
The code is as follows:
library("readstata13")
# Reading the Stata Data file into R
bod_fb <- read.dta13("BoD_nonmissing_fb.dta")
gen_fuzzy_blau <- function(bod_sample){
# Here we drop the Variables that are not required in creating the Fuzzy-Blau index
bod_sample <- as.data.frame(bod_sample)
bod_sample$tot_occur <- as.numeric(bod_sample$tot_occur)
bod_sample$caste1_occ <- as.numeric(bod_sample$caste1_occ)
bod_sample$caste2_occ <- as.numeric(bod_sample$caste2_occ)
bod_sample$caste3_occ <- as.numeric(bod_sample$caste3_occ)
bod_sample$caste4_occ <- as.numeric(bod_sample$caste4_occ)
# Calculating the Probabilites of a director belonging to a caste
bod_sample$caste1_occ <- (bod_sample$caste1_occ)/(bod_sample$tot_occur)
bod_sample$caste2_occ <- (bod_sample$caste2_occ)/(bod_sample$tot_occur)
bod_sample$caste3_occ <- (bod_sample$caste3_occ)/(bod_sample$tot_occur)
bod_sample$caste4_occ <- (bod_sample$caste4_occ)/(bod_sample$tot_occur)
#Dropping the Total Occurances column, as we do not need it anymore
bod_sample$tot_occur<- NULL
# Here we replace all the blanks with NA
bod_sample <- apply(bod_sample, 2, function(x) gsub("^$|^ $", NA, x))
bod_sample <- as.data.frame(bod_sample)
# Here we push all the NAs in the caste names and caste probabilities to the end of the row
# So if there are only two castes against a name, then they become caste1 and caste2
caste_list<-data.frame(bod_sample$caste1,bod_sample$caste2,bod_sample$caste3,bod_sample$caste4)
caste_list = as.data.frame(t(apply(caste_list,1, function(x) { return(c(x[!is.na(x)],x[is.na(x)]) )} )))
caste_list_prob<-data.frame(bod_sample$caste1_occ,bod_sample$caste2_occ,bod_sample$caste3_occ,bod_sample$caste4_occ)
caste_list_prob = as.data.frame(t(apply(caste_list_prob,1, function(x) { return(c(x[!is.na(x)],x[is.na(x)]) )} )))
# Here we write two functions: 1. gen_castelist
# 2. gen_caste_prob
# gen_castelist: This function takes the row number (serial number of the direcor)
# and returns the names of all the castes for which he has a non-zero
# probability.
# gen_caste_prob: This function takes the row number (serial number of the director)
# and returns the probability with which he belongs to the caste
#
gen_castelist <- function(x){
y <- caste_list[x,]
y <- as.vector(y[!is.na(y)])
return(y)
}
gen_caste_prob <- function(x){
z <- caste_list_prob[x,]
z <- z[!is.na(z)]
z <- as.numeric(z)
return(z)
}
caste_ls <-list()
caste_prob_ls <- list()
for(i in 1:nrow(bod_sample))
{
caste_ls[[i]]<- gen_castelist(i)
caste_prob_ls[[i]]<- gen_caste_prob(i)
}
gridcaste <- expand.grid(caste_ls)
gridcaste <- data.frame(lapply(gridcaste, as.character), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
gridcasteprob <- expand.grid(caste_prob_ls)
# Generating the Joint Probability
gridcasteprob$JP <- apply(gridcasteprob,1,prod)
# Generating the Similarity Index
gen_sim_index <- function(x){
x <- t(x)
a <- as.data.frame(table(x))
sim_index <- sum(a$Freq^2)/(sum(a$Freq))^2
return(sim_index)
}
gridcaste$sim_index <- apply(gridcaste,1,gen_sim_index)
# Generating fuzzyblau
gridcaste$fb <- gridcaste$sim_index * gridcasteprob$JP
fuzzy_blau_index <- sum(gridcaste$fb)
remove_list <- c("gridcaste","")
return(fuzzy_blau_index)
}
fuzzy_blau_output <- by(bod_fb,bod_fb$code_year,gen_fuzzy_blau)
# Saving the output as a dataframe with two columns
# Column 1 is the fuzzy blau index
# Column 2 is the code_year
code_year <- names(fuzzy_blau_output)
fuzzy_blau <- as.data.frame(as.vector(unlist(fuzzy_blau_output)))
names(fuzzy_blau) <- c("fuzzy_blau_index")
fuzzy_blau$code_year <- code_year
bod_fb <- merge(bod_fb,fuzzy_blau,by = "code_year")
save.dta13(bod_fb,"bod_fb_example.dta")
If the code is tl;dr, the summary is as follows:
I have a dataframe bod_fb. I need to apply the apply the gen_fuzzy_blau function on this dataframe by slicing the dataframe with factors of bod_fb$code_year.
Since the function is very huge sequential processing is taking more than a day and ends up in running out of memory. The function gen_fuzzy_blau returns a numeric variable fuzzy_blau_index for each code_year of the dataframe. I use by to apply the function on each slice. I wanted to know if there is a way to parallelly implement this code so that multiple instances of the function run at once on different slices of the dataframe. I did not find a by implementation for parallel package and I did not know how to pass the dataframes as iterators while using foreach and doParallel packages.
I have a AMD A8 laptop with 4GB RAM and windows 7 sp1 home basic. I have given 20GB as page file memory (this was after I got the memory error).
Thank you
EDIT 1: #milkmotel I have eliminated the redundancy in the code and removed the for loops, but a huge amount of time is being wasted in gen_sim_index in the function, I am using the proc.time()function to gauge the time that each part of the code is taking.
The function is supposed to the following to a row:
if we have a row (not a vector) say: a a b c the similarity index will be (2/4)^2 + (1/4)^2 + (1/4)^2 ie, summation of (no of occurences of each unique element of each row/total no of elements in the row)^2
I am unable to use the apply function directly on the row because each element in a row because each element in the row has different factors and table() does not output the frequencies properly.
What is an efficient way to code the gen_sim_index function?

Answer 1

You're saving your data 6 times over in 6 different variables. Try not doing that.
and it takes a day because you're running character indexing on a ridiculous amount of data with gsub().
Take your code out of your gen_fuzzy_blau function as it provides no value to wrap it up into one function rather than running it all independently. Then run it all one line at a time. If it takes too long to run, reconsider your method. Your code is incredibly inefficient.