Sample A CSV File Too Large To Load Into R? - r

I have a 3GB csv file. It is too large to load into R on my computer. Instead I would like to load a sample of the rows (say, 1000) without loading the full dataset.
Is this possible? I cannot seem to find an answer anywhere.

If you don't want to pay thousands of dollars to Revolution R so that you can load/analyze your data in one go, sooner or later, you need to figure out a way to sample you data.
And that step is easier to happen outside R.
(1) Linux Shell:
Assuming your data falls into a consistent format. Each row is one record. You can do:
sort -R data | head -n 1000 >data.sample
This will randomly sort all the rows and get the first 1000 rows into a separate file - data.sample
(2) If the data is not small enough to fit into memory.
There is also a solution to use database to store the data. For example, I have many tables stored in MySQL database in a beautiful tabular format. I can do a sample by doing:
select * from tablename order by rand() limit 1000
You can easily communicate between MySQL and R using RMySQL and you can index your column to guarantee the query speed. Also you can verify the mean or standard deviation of the whole dataset versus your sample if you want taking the power of database into consideration.
These are the two most commonly used ways based on my experience for dealing with 'big' data.

Related

DADA2 - Calculating percent of reads that merged

I have been following the tutorial for DADA2 in R for a 16S data-set, and everything runs smoothly; however, I do have a question on how to calculate the total percent of merged reads. After the step to track reads through the pipeline with the following code:
merger <- mergePairs(dadaF1, derepF1, dadaR1, derepR1, verbose=TRUE)
and then tracking the reads through each step:
getN <- function(x) sum(getUniques(x))
track <- cbind(out_2, sapply(dadaFs, getN), sapply(dadaRs, getN), sapply(mergers, getN), rowSums(seqtab.nochim))
I get a table that looks like this, here I am viewing the resuling track data-frame made w/ the above code:
Where input is the total sequences I put in (after demuxing) and filtered is the total sequences after they were filtered based on a parameter of my choosing. The denoisedF and denoisedR are sequences that have been denoised (one for forward reads and another for reverse reads), the total number of merged reads (from the mergePairs command above) and the nonchim are the total sequences that are not chimeras.
My question is this .... to calculate the percent of merged reads - is this a simple division? Say take the first row - (417/908) * 100 = 46% or should I somehow incorporate the denoisedF and denoisedR columns in this calculation?
Thank you very much in advance!
The track object is a matrix (see class(track)), thus you can run operations accordingly. In your case:
track[, "merged"]/track[, "input"] * 100
Or, you could convert the track object into a data frame for a "table" output.
However, I usually export the track output as an excel file and then do my modification there. It is easier to be shared and commented on with non-R users.
I find the write_xlsx function from the writexl package particularly convenient.
Cheers

Copying data from SQL Server to R using ODBC connection

I have successfully set up a R SQL Server ODBC connection by doing:
DBI_connection <- dbConnect(odbc(),
driver = "SQL Server"
server = server_name
database = database_name)
Dataset_in_R <- dbFetch(dbSendQuery(DBI_connection,
"SELECT * FROM MyTable_in_SQL"))
3 quick questions:
1-Is there a quicker way to copy data from SQL Server to R? This table has +44million rows and it is still running...
2-If I make any changes to this data in R does it change anything in my MyTable_in_SQL? I dont think so because I have saved it in a global data.frame variable in R, but just checking.
3-How to avoid going through this step every time I open R? Is there a way to save my data.frame in the "background" in R?
1: Is there a quicker way to copy data from SQL Server to R?
The answer here is rather simple to answer. the odbc package in R does quite a bit under-the-hood to ensure compatibility between the result fetched from the server and R's data structure. It might be possible to obtain a slight increase in speed by using an alternative package (RODBC is an old package, and it sometimes seems faster). In this case however, with 44 mil. rows, I expect that the bigger performance boost comes from preparing your sql-statement. The general idea would be to
Remove any unnecessary columns. Remember each column will need to be downloaded, so if you have 20 columns, removing 1 column may reduce your query execution time by ~5% (assuming linear run-time)
If you plan on performing aggregation, it will (very close to almost) faster to perform this directly in your query, eg, if you have a column called Ticker and a column called Volume and you want the average value of Volume you could calculate this directly in your query. Similar for last row using last_value(colname) over ([partition by [grouping col 1], [grouping col 2] ...] order by [order col 1], [order col 2]) as last_value_colname.
If you choose to do this, it might be beneficial to test your query on a small subset of rows using TOP N or LIMIT N eg: select [select statement] from mytable_in_sql order by [order col] limit 100 which would only return the first 100 rows. As Martin Schmelzer commented this can be done via R with the dplyr::tbl function as well, however it is always faster to correct your statement.
Finally if your query becomes more complex (does not seem to be the case here), it might be beneficial to create a View on the table CREATE VIEW with the specific select statement and query this view instead. The server will then try to optimize the query, and if your problem is on the server side rather than local side, this can improve performance.
Finally one must state the obvious. As noted above when you query the server you are downloading some (maybe quite a lot) of data. This can be improved by improving your internet connection either by repositioning your computer, router or directly connecting via a cord (or purely upgrading ones internet connection). For 44 Mil. rows if you have only a single 64 bit double precision variable, you have 44 * 10^6 / 1024^3 = 2.6 GiB of data (if not compressed). If you have 10 columns, this goes up to 26 GiB of data. It simply is going to take quite a long time to download all of this data. Thus getting this row count down would be extremely helpful!
As a side note you might be able to simply download the table directly via SSMS slightly faster (still slow due to table size) and then import the file locally. For the fastest speed you likely have to look into the Bulk import and export functionality of SQL-server.
2: If I make any changes to this data in R does it change anything in my MyTable_in_SQL?
No: R has no internal pointer/connection once the table has been loaded. I don't even believe a package exists (in R at least) that opens a stream to the table which could dynamically update the table. I know that a functionality like this exists in Excel, but even using this has some dangerous side effects and should (in my opinion) only be used in read-only applications, where the user wants to see a (almost) live-stream of the data.
3: How to avoid going through this step every time I open R? Is there a way to save my data.frame in the "background" in R?
To avoid this, simply save the table after every session. Whenever you close Rstudio it will ask you if you want to save your current session, and here you may click yes, at which point it will save .Rhistory and .Rdata in the getwd() directory, which will be imported the next time you open your session (unless you changed your working directory before closing the session using setwd(...). However I highly suggest you do not do this for larger datasets, as it will cause your R session to take forever to open the next time you open R, as well as possibly creating unnecessary copies of your data (for example if you import it into df and make a transformation in df2 then you will suddenly have 2 copies of a 2.6+ GiB dataset to load every time you open R). Instead I highly suggest saving the file using arrow::write_parquet(df, file_path), which is a much (and I mean MUCH!!) faster alternative to saving as RDS or csv files. These can't be opened as easily in Excel, but can be opened in R using arrow::read_parquet and python using pandas.read_parquet or pyarrow.parquet.read_parquet, while being compressed to a size that is usually 50 - 80 % smaller than the equivalent csv file.
Note:
If you already did save your R session after loading in the file, and you experience a very slow startup, I suggest removing the .RData file from your working directory. Usually the documents folder (C:/Users/[user]/Documents) from your system.
On question 2 you're correct, any changes in R won't change anything in the DB.
About question 3, you can save.image() or save.image('path/image_name.Rdata') and it will save your environment so you can recover it later on another session with load.image('path/image_name.Rdata').
Maybe with this you don't need a faster way to get data from a DB.

R misreading of time from xlsx dataTable

I have an issue very annoying.
I have some oxygen measurements saved in .xlsx table (created directly by the device software). Opened with excel, this is my part of my file.
In the first picture, we can notice that sometimes, the software skips a second (11:13:00 then 13:02).
in the second picture, just notice the continuity of time from 11:19:01 to 11:19:09.
I call my excel table in R with the package readxl with the code
oxy <- read_excel("./Metabolism/20180502 DAPH 20.xlsx" , 1)
And before any manipulation, when I check my table in R (Rstudio), I have that:
In the first case, R kept the time continuity by adding 11:13:01 and shift the next rows.
Then, later, reverse situation: the continuity of time was respected in excel, but R skips a second and again, shits the next rows.
At the end, there is the same number of rows. I guess it is a problem with the way R and excel round the time. But these little errors prevent me using the date to merge two tables, and the calculations afterwards are wrong.
May I do something to tell R to read the data exactly the same way Excel saved them?
Thank you very much!
Index both with a sequential integer counter each starting at the same point and use that for merging like with like. If you want the Excel version to be 'definitive' convert the index back to time with a lookup based on your Excel version.

correlation matrix using large data sets in R when ff matrix memory allocation is not enough

I have a simple analysis to be done. I just need to calculate the correlation of the columns (or rows ,if transposed). Simple enough? I am unable to get the results for the whole week and I have looked through most of the solutions here.
My laptop has a 4GB RAM. I do have access to a server with 32 nodes. My data cannot be loaded here as it is huge (411k columns and 100 rows). If you need any other information or maybe part of the data I can try to put it up here, but the problem can be easily explained without really having to see the data. I simply need to get a correlation matrix of size 411k X 411k which means I need to compute the correlation among the rows of my data.
Concepts I have tried to code: (all of them in some way give me memory issues or run forever)
The most simple way, one row against all, write the result out using append.T. (Runs forever)
biCorPar.r by bobthecat (https://gist.github.com/bobthecat/5024079), splitting the data into blocks and using ff matrix. (unable to allocate memory to assign the corMAT matrix using ff() in my server)
split the data into sets (every 10000 continuous rows will be a set) and do correlation of each set against the other (same logic as bigcorPar) but I am unable to find a way to store them all together finally to generate the final 411kX411k matrix.
I am attempting this now, bigcorPar.r on 10000 rows against 411k (so 10000 is divided into blocks) and save the results in separate csv files.
I am also attempting to run every 1000 vs 411k in one node in my server and today is my 3rd day and I am still on row 71.
I am not an R pro so I could attempt only this much. Either my codes run forever or I do not have enough memory to store the results. Are there any more efficient ways to tackle this issue?
Thanks for all your comments and help.
I'm familiar with this problem myself in the context of genetic research.
If you are interested only in the significant correlations, you may find my package MatrixEQTL useful (available on CRAN, more info here: http://www.bios.unc.edu/research/genomic_software/Matrix_eQTL/ ).
If you want to keep all correlations, I'd like to first warn you that in the binary format (economical compared to text) it would take 411,000 x 411,000 x 8 bytes = 1.3 TB. If this what you want and you are OK with the storage required for that, I can provide my code for such calculations and storage.

Select Rows and Columns At the Same Time in SPSS

I have a dataset in SPSS that has 100K+ rows and over 100 columns. I want to filter both the rows and columns at the same time into a new SPSS dataset.
I can accomplish this very easily using the subset command in R. For example:
new_data = subset(old_data, select = ColumnA >10, select = c(ColumnA, ColumnC, ColumnZZ))
Even easier would be:
new data = old_data[old_data$ColumnA >10, c(1, 4, 89)]
where I am passing the column indices instead.
What is the equivalent in SPSS?
I love R, but the read/write and data management speed of SPSS is significantly better.
I am not sure what exactly you are referring to when you write that "the read/write and data management speed of SPSS being significantly better" than R. Your question itself demonstrates how flexible R is at data management! And, a dataset of 100k rows and 100 columns is by no means a large one.
But, to answer your question, perhaps you are looking for something like this. I'm providing a "programmatic" solution, rather than the GUI one, because you're asking the question on Stack Overflow, where the focus is more on the programming side of things. I'm using a sample data file that can be found here: http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/spss/examples/chp/p004.sav
Save that file to your SPSS working directory, open up your SPSS syntax editor, and type the following:
GET FILE='p004.sav'.
SELECT IF (lactatio <= 3).
SAVE OUTFILE= 'mynewdatafile.sav'
/KEEP currentm previous lactatio.
GET FILE='mynewdatafile.sav'.
More likely, though, you'll have to go through something like this:
FILE HANDLE directoryPath /NAME='C:\path\to\working\directory\' .
FILE HANDLE myFile /NAME='directoryPath/p004.sav' .
GET FILE='myFile'.
SELECT IF (lactatio <= 3).
SAVE OUTFILE= 'directoryPath/mynewdatafile.sav'
/KEEP currentm previous lactatio.
FILE HANDLE myFile /NAME='directoryPath/mynewdatafile.sav'.
GET FILE='myFile'.
You should now have a new file created that has just three columns, and where no value in the "lactatio" column is greater than 3.
So, the basic steps are:
Load the data you want to work with.
Subset for all columns from all the cases you're interested in.
Save a new file with only the variables you're interested in.
Load that new file before you proceed.
With R, the basic steps are:
Load the data you want to work with.
Create an object with your subset of rows and columns (which you know how to do).
Hmm.... I don't know about you, but I know which method I prefer ;)
If you're using the right tools with R, you can also directly read in the specific subset you are interested in without first loading the whole dataset if speed really is an issue.
In spss you can't combine the two actions in one command, but it's easy enough to do it in two:
dataset copy old_data. /* delete this if you don't need to keep both old and new data.
select if ColumnA>10.
add files /file=* /keep=ColumnA ColumnC ColumnZZ.

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