Matrix computation with for loop - r

Question

I am newcomer to R, migrated from GAUSS because of the license verification issues.
I want to speed-up the following code which creates n×k matrix A. Given the n×1 vector x and vectors of parameters mu, sig (both of them k dimensional), A is created as A[i,j]=dnorm(x[i], mu[j], sigma[j]). Following code works ok for small numbers n=40, k=4, but slows down significantly when n is around 10^6 and k is about the same size as n^{1/3}.
I am doing simulation experiment to verify the bootstrap validity, so I need to repeatedly compute matrix A for #ofsimulation × #bootstrap times, and it becomes little time comsuming as I want to experiment with many different values of n,k. I vectorized the code as much as I could (thanks to vector argument of dnorm), but can I ask more speed up?
Preemptive thanks for any help.
x = rnorm(40)
mu = c(-1,0,4,5)
sig = c(2^2,0.5^2,2^2,3^2)
n = length(x)
k = length(mu)
A = matrix(NA,n,k)
for(j in 1:k){
A[,j]=dnorm(x,mu[j],sig[j])
}

Answer 1

Your method can be put into a function like this
A.fill <- function(x,mu,sig) {
k <- length(mu)
n <- length(x)
A <- matrix(NA,n,k)
for(j in 1:k) A[,j] <- dnorm(x,mu[j],sig[j])
A
}
and it's clear that you are filling the matrix A column by column.
R stores the entries of a matrix columnwise (just like Fortran).
This means that the matrix can be filled with a single call of dnorm using suitable repetitions of x, mu, and sig. The vector z will have the columns of the desired matrix stacked. and then the matrix to be returned can be formed from that vector just by specifying the number of rows an columns. See the following function
B.fill <- function(x,mu,sig) {
k <- length(mu)
n <- length(x)
z <- dnorm(rep(x,times=k),rep(mu,each=n),rep(sig,each=n))
B <- matrix(z,nrow=n,ncol=k)
B
}
Let's make an example with your data and test this as follows:
N <- 40
set.seed(11)
x <- rnorm(N)
mu <- c(-1,0,4,5)
sig <- c(2^2,0.5^2,2^2,3^2)
A <- A.fill(x,mu,sig)
B <- B.fill(x,mu,sig)
all.equal(A,B)
# [1] TRUE
I'm assuming that n is an integer multiple of k.
Addition
As noted in the comments B.fill is quite slow for large values of n.
The reason lies in the construct rep(...,each=...).
So is there a way to speed A.fill.
I tested this function:
C.fill <- function(x,mu,sig) {
k <- length(mu)
n <- length(x)
sapply(1:k,function(j) dnorm(x,mu[j],sig[j]), simplify=TRUE)
}
This function is about 20% faster than A.fill.