Using Histogram as input in R - r

Question

This is admittedly a very simple question that I just can't find an answer to.
In R, I have a file that has 2 columns: 1 of categorical data names, and the second a count column (count for each of the categories). With a small dataset, I would use 'reshape' and the function 'untable' to make 1 column and do analysis that way. The question is, how to handle this with a large data set?
In this case, my data is humungous and that just isn't going to work.
My question is, how do I tell R to use something like the following as distribution data:
Cat Count
A 5
B 7
C 1
That is, I give it a histogram as an input and have R figure out that it means there are 5 of A, 7 of B and 1 of C when calculating other information about the data.
The desired input rather than output would be for R to understand that the data would be the same as follows,
A
A
A
A
A
B
B
B
B
B
B
B
C
In reasonable size data, I can do this on my own, but what do you do when the data is very large?
Edit
The total sum of all the counts is 262,916,849.
In terms of what it would be used for:
This is new data, trying to understand the correlation between this new data and other pieces of data. Need to work on linear regressions and mixed models.

Answer 1

I think what you're asking is to reshape a data frame of categories and counts into a single vector of observations, where categories are repeated. Here's one way:
dat <- data.frame(Cat=LETTERS[1:3],Count=c(5,7,1))
# Cat Count
#1 A 5
#2 B 7
#3 C 1
rep.int(dat$Cat,times=dat$Count)
# [1] A A A A A B B B B B B B C
#Levels: A B C

Answer 2

To follow up on #Blue Magister's excellent answer, here's a 100,000 row histogram with a total count of 551,245,193:
set.seed(42)
Cat <- sapply(rep(10, 100000), function(x) {
paste(sample(LETTERS, x, replace=TRUE), collapse='')
})
dat <- data.frame(Cat, Count=sample(1000:10000, length(Cat), replace=TRUE))
> head(dat)
Cat Count
1 XYHVQNTDRS 5154
2 LSYGMYZDMO 4724
3 XDZYCNKXLV 8691
4 TVKRAVAFXP 2429
5 JLAZLYXQZQ 5704
6 IJKUBTREGN 4635
This is a pretty big dataset by my standards, and the operation Blue Magister describes is very quick:
> system.time(x <- rep(dat$Cat,times=dat$Count))
user system elapsed
4.48 1.95 6.42
It uses about 6GB of RAM to complete the operation.

Answer 3

This really depends on what statistics you are trying to calculate. The xtabs function will create tables for you where you can specify the counts. The Hmisc package has functions like wtd.mean that will take a vector of weights for computing a mean (and related functions for standard deviation, quantiles, etc.). The biglm package could be used to expand parts of the dataset at a time and analyze. There are probably other packages as well that would handle the frequency data, but which is best depends on what question(s) you are trying to answer.

Answer 4

The existing answers are all expanding the pre-binned dataset into a full distribution and then using R's histogram function which is memory inefficient and will not scale for very large datasets like the original poster asked about. The HistogramTools CRAN package includes a
PreBinnedHistogram function which takes arguments for breaks and counts to create a Histogram object in R without massively expanding the dataset.
For Example, if the data set has 3 buckets with 5, 7, and 1 elements, all of the other solutions posted here so far expand that into a list of 13 elements first and then create the histogram. PreBinnedHistogram in contrast creates the histogram directly from the 3 element input list without creating a much larger intermediate vector in memory.
big.histogram <- PreBinnedHistogram(my.data$breaks, my.data$counts)