R help - Oct 2009 - dgTMatrix --- [, , drop=F] strange behavior, Matrix 0.999375-20

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Hi,

I have something strange here...
I want to subset a large sparse matrix, with the subset being still in
sparse form. Easily achievable with mm[i,,drop=F] , right? Well, it
doesn't work on the matrix I'm working on.

This is a very large wikipedia Matrix (now I can play with it as I just
got 16Gb of memory):
> mm at Dim
[1]  793251 1027355
> nnzero(mm)
[1] 205746204
> class(mm)
[1] "dgTMatrix"
attr(,"package")
[1] "Matrix"

Imagine I want just the first row:
> a = mm[1,,drop=F]
> length(a)
[1] 1027355
> nnzero(a)
[1] 1291
>class(a)
"numeric"

However, _a_ is just a numeric (dense) vector (!). This takes a long
time and a big bite off my memory.
This is NOT what I get when I play with a toy example. In this case it
works as expected:
> (m <- Matrix(c(0,0,2:0), 3,5))
3 x 5 sparse Matrix of class "dgCMatrix"

[1,] . 1 . . 2
[2,] . . 2 . 1
[3,] 2 . 1 . .
> a = m[1,,drop=F]
> a
1 x 5 sparse Matrix of class "dgCMatrix"

[1,] . 1 . . 2

I wonder if it's a matter of size:
> M <- kronecker(m, diag(10000))
> a = m[1,,drop=F]
> class(a)
[1] "dgCMatrix"
attr(,"package")
[1] "Matrix"

Looks like it's working as expected on a sizeable example. What could be
going on? What's the difference between mm and M, (other than size?).
I'm not sure this is enough info to reproduce the problem (i.e., the
example matrices I posted work, mine doesn't). The problematic matrix is
.5gb compressed as .Rdata, so it's not easy to send it around.

This is  0.999375-20, not the latest version as of today: 0.999375-29;
however it's the only one available in the revolution 64 repositories
(win64).

Any idea what to try next? I cannot afford to operate with dense
representations.

Best,
- -Jose
- --
=== I'm learning a new keyboard layout. I type slowly. Please excuse
typos and slower-that-usual responses. Thanks for your patience==Jose Quesada,
PhD.

Max Planck Institute,
Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition -ABC-,
Lentzeallee 94, office 224, 14195 Berlin

http://www.josequesada.name/
http://twitter.com/Quesada

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