how to speed up an R for loop?

Question

I am running the following for loop for the gwr.basic function in the GWmodel package in R. What I need to do is to collect the mean of estimate parameter for any given bandwidt

Answer 1

I got the same impression like @musically_ut. The for loop and the traditional for-vs.apply debate is unlikely to help you here. Try to go for parallelization if you got more than one core. There are several packages like parallel or snowfall. Which package is ultimately the best and fastest depends on your machine and operating system.

Best does not always equal fastest here. A code that works cross-platform and can be worth more than a bit of extra performance. Also transparency and ease of use can outweigh maximum speed. That being said I like the standard solution a lot and would recommend to use parallel which ships with R and works on Windows, OSX and Linux.

EDIT: here's the fully reproducible example using the OP's example.

library(GWmodel)
data("DubVoter")

library(parallel)

bwlist <- list(bw1 = 20, bw2 = 21)


cl <- makeCluster(detectCores())

# load 'GWmodel' for each node
clusterEvalQ(cl, library(GWmodel))

# export data to each node
clusterExport(cl, varlist = c("bwlist","Dub.voter"))

out <- parLapply(cl, bwlist, function(e){
 try(gwr.basic(GenEl2004 ~ DiffAdd + LARent + SC1 +
 Unempl + LowEduc + Age18_24 + Age25_44 +
 Age45_64, data = Dub.voter,
 bw = e,  kernel = "bisquare",
 adaptive = TRUE, F123.test = TRUE  ))

} )


LArent_l <- lapply(lapply(out,"[[","SDF"),"[[","LARent")
unlist(lapply(LArent_l,"mean"))

# finally, stop the cluster
stopCluster(cl)