Subsetting every x amount of columns as separate sites - r

I need a function that recognises every x amount of columns as a separate site. So in df1 below there are 8 columns, with 4 sites each consisting of 2 variables. Previously, I have used a procedure like this as answered here Selecting column sequences and creating variables.
set.seed(24)
df1 <- as.data.frame(matrix(sample(0:20, 8*10, replace=TRUE), ncol=8))
I then need to calculate a column sum so that a total for each variable is obtained.
colsums <- as.data.frame(t(colSums(df1)))
I subsequently split the dataframe using this technique...
lst1 <- setNames(lapply(split(1:ncol(colsums), as.numeric(gl(ncol(colsums),
2, ncol(colsums)))), function(i) colsums[,i]), paste0('site', 1:4))
list2env(lst1, envir=.GlobalEnv)
And organise into one dataframe...
Combined <- as.matrix(mapply(c,site1,site2,site3,site4))
rownames(Combined) <- c("Site.1","Site.2","Site.3","Site.4")
Whilst this technique has been great on smaller dataframes, where there are a substantial amount of sites (>500) typing out each site following the mapply function takes up a lot of code and could lead to some sites getting missed off if I'm typing them all in manually. Is there an easy way to overcome this following the colsums stage?

A matrix is a vector with dimensions. Matrices are stored in column-major order in R.
The call matrix(colsums, nrow=2) should help you a lot.
NB.: Polluting the "global" environment is generally a bad idea.

Related

In-place list modification without for loop in R

I'm wondering whether there is a way to do in-place modification of objects in a list without using a for loop. This would be useful, for example, if the individual objects in the list are large and complex, so that we want to avoid making a temporary copy of the entire object. As an example, consider the following code, which creates a list of three data frames, then calculates the vector of maximums across all three data frames for one column of the data, and then assigns that vector to each original data frame. (Code like this is needed when aligning plots in ggplot2.)
data_list <- lapply(1:3, function(x) data.frame(x=rnorm(10), y=rnorm(10), z=rnorm(10)))
max_x <- do.call(pmax, lapply(data_list, function(d){d$x}))
for( i in 1:length(data_list))
{
data_list[[i]]$x <- max_x
}
Is there any way to write the final part without a for loop?
Answers to some of the questions I'm getting:
What makes me think a copy would be made? I don't know for sure whether a copy would or would not be made. The actual scenario I'm working with deals with entire ggplot graphs (see e.g. here). Since they are rather large and complex, it's critical that no copy be made.
What's the problem with a for loop? I just would rather iterate directly over a list than have to introduce a counter. I don't like counters.
Why not use data.table? Because I'm actually manipulating ggplot graphs, not data frames. The code provided here is just a simplified example.
Base R data structures are copy-on-modify with sharing. Take your example of a data.frame with three numeric columns. Each data.frame is a length 3 "list" vector, each containing a reference to the numeric vectors of the underlying columns. If we modify/replace the first column, R creates a new length 3 data.frame "list" containing references to the new(ly modified) column and the other two unmodified columns.
Let's take a look using the address function*
set.seed(1)
data_list <- lapply(1:3, function(x) data.frame(x=rnorm(10), y=rnorm(10), z=rnorm(10)))
before <- rapply(data_list,address)
Now you want to replace the first column with
max_x <- do.call(pmax, lapply(data_list, function(d){d$x}))
How you do this doesn't much matter, but here's one way without an explicit loop-with-counter
data_list <- lapply(data_list,`[<-`,"x",value=max_x)
after <- rapply(data_list,address)
Now compare the addresses before and after. Note that the addresses for the y and z columns have not changed. Furthermore, all "after" x columns have the same address -- the address of max_x!
address(max_x)
[1] "05660600"
cbind(before,after)
before after
x "0565F530" "05660600"
y "0565F400" "0565F400"
z "05660AC0" "05660AC0"
x "05660A28" "05660600"
y "05660990" "05660990"
z "05660860" "05660860"
x "056607C8" "05660600"
y "05660730" "05660730"
z "05660698" "05660698"
This means you don't have to worry as much as you might think about making a change to a large data structure. In general, only the modified piece and the skeleton of the data structure will have to be replaced. In this example, the max_x vector had to be created anyway, so the only overhead is creating a new 3 cell data.frame "list" and populating it with 3 references**. This, however, could start to become inefficient if you are iteratively "banging on" changes or working with subvectors rather than entire columns. These are use cases for data.table that are not applicable to this example.
* The address function used here is exported from the data.table package.
** And, of course, in this example, the 3 cell outer list "list" containing the 3 data.frames themselves.

bind together sparse model matrices by row names

I am trying to construct a large sparse matrix with a split-apply-combine approach by separately calling sparse.model.matrix() from the package Matrix on subsets of columns of a dataframe and then binding them together into a full matrix. I have to do this because of memory limitations (I can't call sparse.model.matrix on the whole df at once). This process works fine, and I get a list of sparse matrices, but these have different dimensions and when I try to bind them together, I can't.
ex:
data(iris)
set.seed(100)
iris$v6 <- sample(c("a","b","c",NA), 150, replace=TRUE)
iris$v7 <- sample(c("x","y",NA), 150, replace = TRUE)
sparse_m1 <- sparse.model.matrix(~., iris[,1:5])
sparse_m2 <- sparse.model.matrix(~.-1, iris[, 6:7])
dim(sparse_m1)
[1] 150 7
dim(sparse_m2)
[1] 71 4
cbind2(sparse_m1, sparse_m2)
Error: Matrices must have same number of rows in cbind2(sparse_m1, sparse_m2)
cbind(sparse_m1, sparse_m2)
Error: Matrices must have same number of rows in cbind2(..1, r)
The matrices have the same row names, just some rows have been omitted from sparse_m2 because they had missing values in both columns. Is there any way to combine them?
I also tried using rbind.fill.matrix() from the plyr package, by first transposing and then calling it and then re-transposing, but then I lose column names since row names are ignored in rbind.fill.matrix.
Any ideas?
An old question still in need of an answer...
One approach is to create an empty Matrix of the required dimensions and then populate it:
m12.dimnames<-list(union(rownames(sparse_m1),rownames(sparse_m2)),c(colnames(sparse_m1),colnames(sparse_m2)))
m12<- Matrix(0,nrow=length(m12.dimnames[[1]]),ncol=length(m12.dimnames[[2]]),dimnames=m12.dimnames)
m12[rownames(sparse_m2),colnames(sparse_m2)]<-sparse_m1
m12[rownames(sparse_m2),colnames(sparse_m2)]<-sparse_m2
recently bumped in the same issue, and nowadays you can
install.packages("Matrix.utils")
library(Matrix.utils)
sparse_filled <- rBind.fill(sparse_m1, sparse_m2)

Applying a function to a dataframe to trim empty columns within a list environment R

I am a naive user of R and am attempting to come to terms with the 'apply' series of functions which I now need to use due to the complexity of the data sets.
I have large, ragged, data frame that I wish to reshape before conducting a sequence of regression analyses. It is further complicated by having interlaced rows of descriptive data(characters).
My approach to date has been to use a factor to split the data frame into sets with equal row lengths (i.e. a list), then attempt to remove the trailing empty columns, make two new, matching lists, one of data and one of chars and then use reshape to produce a common column number, then recombine the sets in each list. e.g. a simplified example:
myDF <- as.data.frame(rbind(c("v1",as.character(1:10)),
c("v1",letters[1:10]),
c("v2",c(as.character(1:6),rep("",4))),
c("v2",c(letters[1:6], rep("",4)))))
myDF[,1] <- as.factor(myDF[,1])
myList <- split(myDF, myDF[,1])
myList[[1]]
I can remove the empty columns for an individual set and can split the data frame into two sets from the interlacing rows but have been stumped with the syntax in writing a function to apply the following function to the list - though 'lapply' with 'seq_along' should do it?
Thus for the individual set:
DF <- myList[[2]]
DF <- DF[,!sapply(DF, function(x) all(x==""))]
DF
(from an earlier answer to a similar, but simpler example on this site). I have a large data set and would like an elegant solution (I could use a loop but that would not use the capabilities of R effectively). Once I have done that I ought to be able to use the same rationale to reshape the frames and then recombine them.
regards
jac
Try
lapply(split(myDF, myDF$V1), function(x) x[!colSums(x=='')])

Is there an easy way to standardize every single column in a table without loops (using R)?

I need to standardize all except one column in a dataframe, with which I'm using knn. I know that I can do this with loops, but it seems like there might be an easier way, especially since I am working with 200+ columns/factors, which would have to be renamed.
Any suggestions?
yes. I assumed you would prefer to identify the variable not to be scaled based on its name rather than identfying it by it's column position. Without a toy example I can only surmise this is exactly what you want.
x <- data.frame(replicate(10, rnorm(10)))
names(x) <- letters[1:10]
##let's say you don't want to scale "b"
scalevars <- setdiff(names(x), "b")
x.scaled <- data.frame(sapply(x[,scalevars], scale),b=x[,"b"])
x.scaled <- x.scaled[,names(x)] #to get the original order of variables

Endless function/loop in R: Data Management

I am trying to restructure an enormous dataframe (about 12.000 cases): In the old dataframe one person is one row and has about 250 columns (e.g. Person 1, test A1, testA2, testB, ...)and I want all the results of test A (1 - 10 A´s overall and 24 items (A-Y) for that person in one column, so one person end up with 24 columns and 10 rows. There is also a fixed dataframe part before the items A-Y start (personal information like age, gender etc.), which I want to keep as it is (fixdata).
The function/loop works for 30 cases (I tried it in advance) but for the 12.000 it is still calculating, for nearly 24hours now. Any ideas why?
restructure <- function(data, firstcol, numcol, numsets){
out <- data.frame(t(rep(0, (firstcol-1)+ numcol)) )
names(out) <- names(daten[0:(firstcol+numcol-1)])
for(i in 1:nrow(daten)){
fixdata <- (daten[i, 1:(firstcol-1)])
for (j in (seq(firstcol, ((firstcol-1)+ numcol* numsets), by = numcol))){
flexdata <- daten[i, j:(j+numcol-1)]
tmp <- cbind(fixdata, flexdata)
names(tmp) <- names(daten[0:(firstcol+numcol-1)])
out <- rbind(out,tmp)
}
}
out <- out[2:nrow(out),]
return(out)
}
Thanks in advance!
Idea why: you rbind to out in each iteration. This will take longer each iteration as out grows - so you have to expect more than linear growth in run time with increasing data sets.
So, as Andrie tells you can look at melt.
Or you can do it with core R: stack.
Then you need to cbind the fixed part yourself to the result, (you need to repeat the fixed columns with each = n.var.cols
A third alternative would be array2df from package arrayhelpers.
I agree with the others, look into reshape2 and the plyr package, just want to add a little in another direction. Particularly melt, cast,dcast might help you. Plus, it might help to make use of smart column names, e.g.:
As<-grep("^testA",names(yourdf))
# returns a vector with the column position of all testA1 through 10s.
Besides, if you 'spent' the two dimensions of a data.frame on test# and test type, there's obviously none left for the person. Sure, you identify them by an ID, that you could add an aesthetic to when plotting, but depending on what you want to do you might want to store them in a list. So you end up with a list of persons with a data.frame for every person. I am not sure what you are trying to do, but still hope this helps though.
Maybe you're not getting the plyr or other functions for reshaping the data component. How about something more direct and low level. If you currently just have one line that goes A1, A2, A3... A10, B1-B10, etc. then extract that lump of stuff from your data frame, I'm guessing columns 11-250, and then just make that section the shape you want and put them back together.
yDat <- data[, 11:250]
yDF <- lapply( 1:nrow(data), function(i) matrix(yDat[i,], ncol = 24) )
yDF <- do.call(rbind, y) #combine the list of matrices returned above into one
yDF <- data.frame(yDF) #get it back into a data.frame
names(yDF) <- LETTERS[1:24] #might as well name the columns
That's the fastest way to get the bulk of your data in the shape you want. All the lapply function did was add dimension attributes to each row so that they were in the shape you wanted and then return them as a list, which was massaged with the subsequent rows. But now it doesn't have any of your ID information from the main data.frame. You just need to replicate each row of the first 10 columns 10 times. Or you can use the convenience function merge to help with that. Make a common column that is already in your first 10 rows one of the columns of the new data.frame and then just merge them.
yInfo <- data[, 1:10]
ID <- yInfo$ID
yDF$ID <- rep( yInfo$ID, each = 10 )
newDat <- merge(yInfo, yDF)
And now you're done... mostly, you might want to make an extra column that names the new rows
newDat$condNum <- rep(1:10, nrow(newDat)/10)
This will be very fast running code. Your data.frame really isn't that big at all and much of the above will execute in a couple of seconds.
This is how you should be thinking of data in R. Not that there aren't convenience functions to handle the bulk of this but you should be doing this that avoid looping as much as possible. Technically, what happened above only had one loop, the lapply used right at the start. It had very little in that loop as well (they should be compact when you use them). You're writing in scalar code and it is very very slow in R... even if you weren't really abusing memory and growing data while doing it. Furthermore, keep in mind that, while you can't always avoid a loop of some kind, you can almost always avoid nested loops, which is one of your biggest problems.
(read this to better understand your problems in this code... you've made most of the big errors in there)

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