How should I combine two loops in r? - r

Question

I want to ask your opinion since I am not so sure how to do it. This is regarding one part of my paper project and my situation is:
Stage I
I have 2 groups and for each group I need to compute the following steps:
Generate 3 random numbers from normal distribution and square them.
Repeat step 1 for 15 times and at the end I will get 15 random numbers.
I already done stage I using for loop.
n1<-3
n2<-3
miu<-0
sd1<-1
sd2<-1
asim<-15
w<-rep(NA,asim)
x<-rep(NA,asim)
for (i in 1:asim) {
print(i)
set.seed(i)
data1<-rnorm(n1,miu,sd1)
data2<-rnorm(n2,miu,sd2)
w[i]<-sum(data1^2)
x[i]<-sum(data2^2)
}
w
x
Second stage is;
Stage II
For each group, I need to:
Sort the group;
Find trimmed mean for each group.
For the whole process (stage I and stage II) I need to simulate them for 5000 times. How am I going to proceed with step 2? Do you think I need to put another loop to proceed with stage II?

Answer 1

Those are tasks you can do without explicit loops. Therefore, note a few things: It is the same if you generate 3 times 15 times 2000 random numbers or if you generate them all at once. They still share the same distribution.
Next: Setting the seed within each loop makes your simulation deterministic. Call set.seed once at the start of your script.
So, what we will do is to generate all random numbers at once, then compute their squared norms for groups of three, then build groups of 15.
First some variable definitions:
set.seed(20131301)
repetitions <- 2000
numperval <- 3
numpergroup <- 15
miu <- 0
sd1 <- 1
sd2 <- 1
As we need two groups, we wrap the group generation stuff into a custom function. This is not necessary, but does help a bit in keeping the code clean an readable.
generateGroup <- function(repetitions, numperval, numpergroup, m, s) {
# Generate all data
data <- rnorm(repetitions*numperval*numpergroup, m, s)
# Build groups of 3:
data <- matrix(data, ncol=numperval)
# And generate the squared norm of those
data <- rowSums(data*data)
# Finally build a matrix with 15 columns, each column one dataset of numbers, each row one repetition
matrix(data, ncol=numpergroup)
}
Great, now we can generate random numbers for our group:
group1 <- generateGroup(repetitions, numperval, numpergroup, miu, sd1)
group2 <- generateGroup(repetitions, numperval, numpergroup, miu, sd2)
To compute the trimmed mean, we again utilize apply:
trimmedmeans_group1 <- apply(group1, 1, mean, trim=0.25)
trimmedmeans_group2 <- apply(group2, 1, mean, trim=0.25)
I used mean with the trim argument instead of sorting, throwing away and computing the mean. If you need the sorted numbers explicitly, you could do it by hand (just for one group, this time):
sorted <- t(apply(group1, 1, sort))
# We have to transpose as apply by default returns a matrix with each observation in one column. I chose the other way around above, so we stick with this convention and transpose.
Now, it would be easy to throw away the first and last two columns and generate the mean, if you want to do it manually.