similar to: manipulating "by" lists and "ave()" functions

Dear R experts--- Has anyone written parallel versions of "by" (i.e., mcby) and "ave" (i.e. mcave) ? I did ask a question like this a year ago, and then the answer was no. for those who are googling the group for the answer to this question, in the meantime, the poor man's version of "by" is mclapply( split( ds, factor ), FUN ) I don't know the poor

Dear R experts--- after many years, I am planning to give in and write my first R package. I want to combine my collection of collected useful utility routines. as my guide, I am planning to use Friedrich Leisch's "Creating R Packages: A Tutorial" from Sep 2009. Is there a newer or better tutorial? this one is 4 years old. I also plan on one change---given that the

Dear R wizards: is there a clean way to assign to elements in a list? what I would like to do, in pseudo R+perl notation is f <- function(a,b) list(a+b,a-b) (c,d) <- f(1,2) and have c be assigned 1+2 and d be assigned 1-2. right now, I use the clunky x <- f(1,2) c <- x[[1]] d <- x[[2]] rm(x) which seems awful. is there a nicer syntax? regards, /iaw ---- Ivo Welch

dear R experts--- I am experimenting with multicore processing, so far with pretty disappointing results. Here is my simple example: A <- 100000 randvalues <- abs(rnorm(A)) minfn <- function( x, i ) { log(abs(x))+x^3+i/A+randvalues[i] } ?## an arbitrary function ARGV <- commandArgs(trailingOnly=TRUE) if (ARGV[1] == "do-onecore") { ?library(foreach) ?discard <-

dear r experts---Is there a multicore equivalent of by(), just like mclapply() is the multicore equivalent of lapply()? if not, is there a fast way to convert a data.table into a list based on a column that lapply and mclapply can consume? advice appreciated...as always. regards, /iaw ---- Ivo Welch (ivo.welch at gmail.com)

is it possible to throw a stop() that is so hard that it will escape even tryCatch? /iaw ---- Ivo Welch (ivo.welch at gmail.com)

dear R experts---I am using the coef() function to pick off the coefficients from an lm() object. alas, I also need the standard errors and I need them fast. I know I can do a "summary()" on the object and pick them off this way, but this computes other stuff I do not need. Or, I can compute (X' X)^(-1) s^2 myself. Has someone written a fast se() function? incidentally, I think

every time I read the R release notes for the next release, I see many functions that I had forgotten about and many functions that I never knew existed to begin with. (who knew there were bibtex facilities in R? obviously, everyone except me.) I wonder whether there is a complete list of all R commands (incl the standard packages) somewhere, preferably each with its one-liner AND

this is not an important question, but I wonder why lm returns an error, and whether this can be shut off. it would seem to me that returning NA's would make more sense in some cases---after all, the problem is clearly that coefficients cannot be computed. I know that I can trap the lm.fit() error---although I have always found this to be quite inconvenient---and this is easy if I have only

dear R experts: has someone written a function that returns the results of by() as a data frame? ??of course, this can work only if the output of the function that is an argument to by() is a numerical vector. presumably, what is now names(byobject) would become a column in the data frame, and the by object's list elements would become columns. it's a little bit like flattening the by()

dear R experts---is there a function that prints a data frame to a string? cat() cannot handle lists, so I cannot write cat("your data frame is:\n", df, "\n"). regards, /iaw ---- Ivo Welch (ivo.welch@gmail.com) [[alternative HTML version deleted]]

dear R experts---now I have a case where I want to estimate very large regression models with many fixed effects---not just the mean type, but cross-fixed effects---years, months, locations, firms. Many millions of observations, a few thousand variables (most of these variables are interaction fixed effects). could someone please point me to packages, if any, that would help me estimate such

dear R experts---I am trying to replicate a perl feature. I want to be able to embed R commands inside a character string, and have the string be printed with the command executed. my perl equivalent is my $a=10; my $teststring = "the expression, $a+1, is ::$a+1::, but add one more for ::$a+2::\n"; $teststring =~ s/::(.*?)::/$1/gee; print $teststring; of course, R does not use

Dear R Wizards---is it possible to get R to show its current call stack (sys.calls()) upon an error abort? I don't use ESS for execution, and it is often not obvious how to locate how I triggered an error in an R internal function. Seeing the call stack would make this easier. (right now, I sprinkle "cat" statements everywhere, just to locate the line where the error appears.) Of

dear R wizards: an operation I execute often is the deletion of all observations (in a matrix or data set) that have at least one NA. (I now need this operation for kde2d, because its internal quantile call complains; could this be considered a buglet?) usually, my data sets are small enough for speed not to matter, and there I do not care whether my method is pretty inefficient (ok, I

Dear R-experts---is there a relatively low-pain way to get unicode characters into a plot to a pdf device? pdf(file="cardsymbols.pdf") plot( 0, xlim=c(0,5), ylim=c(0,5), type="n") text(1,1, "&spades;") text(2,2, "&hearts;") text(3,3, "&diams;") text(4,4, "&clubs;") dev.off() (these are the characters that I need the most

I would like to insert a few modest size data frames directly into my R code. a short illustration example of what I want is d <- read.csv( _END_, row.names=1 ) , "col1", "col2" "row1",1,2 "row2",3,4 __END__ right now, the data sits in external files. I could put each column into its own vector and then combine into a data frame, but this seems

I am using a variant of stopifnot a lot. can I suggest that base R extends its functionality? I know how to do this for myself. this is a suggestion for beginners and students. I don't think it would break anything. first, I think it would be more useful if it had an optional character string, so users could write stopifnot( is.matrix(m), "m is not a matrix" ) this would

## the following is a dream: add some sugar syntax to allow for contracts with teeth (in and out checking) > is.positive <- function(x) (all(x>0)) > exponentiate <- function( x ::is.data.frame , exponent ::is.numeric is.positive) :: is.vector is.numeric { x$base :: is.positive ## error also if base does not exist in x; may need some special IQ x$base^exponent }

dear R experts: ?apologies for all my speed and memory questions. ?I have a bet with my coauthors that I can make R reasonably efficient through R-appropriate programming techniques. this is not just for kicks, but for work. for benchmarking, my [3 year old] Mac Pro has 2.8GHz Xeons, 16GB of RAM, and R 2.13.1. right now, it seems that 'split()' is why I am losing my bet. ?(split is an