R tips and tricks – get the gist | R-bloggers

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R tips and tricks – get the gist
Posted on October 1, 2022 by Eran Raviv in R bloggers | 0 Comments
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In scientific programming speed is important. Functions written for general public use have a lot of control-flow checks which are not necessary if you are confident enough with your code.To quicken your code execution I suggest to strip run-of-the-mill functions to their bare bones. You can save serious wall-clock time by using only the laborers code lines. Below is a walk-through example of what I mean.
I use the quantile function for the example. There are many ways to compute the estimate of a quantile, and all those various ways are coded into the one quantile function. The function has the default argument type = 7 which indicates the particular way we wish to estimate our quantiles. Given that R is an open-source language you can easily find the code for any function, then you can “fish out” only the lines that you actually need. While the code for the quantile function is around 90 lines (given below), the real labor is carried out mainly by lines 49 to 58 – the main workhorse (for the type=7 default).
Now, let’s write our own version of the quantile function; call it lean_quantile. Then we make sure our lean_quantile does what its meant to do, and compare the execution time.
lean_quantile