R help - Nov 2012 - blackboost (mboost package) function leads to non-reclaimable memory usage

Dear all,

I am puzzled by R's memory usage when calling the blackboost function from
package mboost to estimate a Gradient boosting model on a simulated dataset
with 20 correlated variables and 100,000 obs. The blackboost object created
by the function is only 15.3Mb, but R's memory usage increases by about
3.9Gb during the estimation of the model and the memory is not released even
after calling the garbage collection with gc() or saving and reloading the
workspace to a new R session. I wonder what is causing this behavior and if
there is a way to free up the extra memory? I appreciate any thoughts since
I would really like to use this function.

I already posted a similar question on  stackoverflow
<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13195733/how-can-i-remove-invisible-objects-form-an-r-workspace-that-are-not-removed-by-g>
, however haven't gotten any solutions yet.

The following code and output illustrates my quesion:



Thanks
Nima



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On Sun, Nov 4, 2012 at 1:06 PM, nima82 <nima.mehrafshan at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I am puzzled by R's memory usage when calling the blackboost function
from
> package mboost to estimate a Gradient boosting model on a simulated dataset
> with 20 correlated variables and 100,000 obs. The blackboost object created
> by the function is only 15.3Mb, but R's memory usage increases by about
> 3.9Gb during the estimation of the model and the memory is not released
even
> after calling the garbage collection with gc() or saving and reloading the
> workspace to a new R session. I wonder what is causing this behavior and if
> there is a way to free up the extra memory? I appreciate any thoughts since
> I would really like to use this function.
>
> I already posted a similar question on  stackoverflow
>
<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13195733/how-can-i-remove-invisible-objects-form-an-r-workspace-that-are-not-removed-by-g>
> , however haven't gotten any solutions yet.
>
Hi Nima,

Looking briefly over this, it seems that there's possibly a memory
allocation error somewhere in the C routines called by mboost. I'd
suggest you contact the package maintainer directly with a
reproducible example. To get contact info, use the maintainer()
function.

Cheers,
Michael