“smoothing” time data - can it be done more efficient?

Question

I have a data frame containing an ID, a start date and an end date. My data is ordered by ID, start, end (in this sequence).

Now I want all rows with the same ID hav

Answer 1

Marcel, I thought I'd just try to improve your code a little. The version below is about 30x faster (from 3 seconds to 0.1 seconds)... The trick is to first extract the three columns to integer and double vectors.

As a side note, I try to use [[ where applicable, and try to keep integers as integers by writing j <- j + 1L etc. That does not make any difference here, but sometimes coercing between integers and doubles can take quite some time.

smoothingEpisodes3 <- function (theData) {
    theLength <- nrow(theData)
    if (theLength < 2L) return(theData)

    id <- as.integer(theData[["ID"]])
    start <- as.numeric(theData[["START"]])
    end <- as.numeric(theData[["END"]])

    curId <- id[[1L]]
    curStart <- start[[1L]]
    curEnd <- end[[1L]]

    out.1 <- integer(length = theLength)
    out.2 <- out.3 <- numeric(length = theLength)

    j <- 1L

    for(i in 2:nrow(theData)) {
        nextId <- id[[i]]
        nextStart <- start[[i]]
        nextEnd <- end[[i]]

        if (curId != nextId | (curEnd + 1) < nextStart) {
            out.1[[j]] <- curId
            out.2[[j]] <- curStart
            out.3[[j]] <- curEnd

            j <- j + 1L

            curId <- nextId
            curStart <- nextStart
            curEnd <- nextEnd
        } else {
            curEnd <- max(curEnd, nextEnd, na.rm = TRUE)
        }
    }

    out.1[[j]] <- curId
    out.2[[j]] <- curStart
    out.3[[j]] <- curEnd

    theOutput <- data.frame(ID = out.1[1:j], START = as.Date(out.2[1:j], origin = "1970-01-01"), END = as.Date(out.3[1:j], origin = "1970-01-01"))

    theOutput
}

Then, the following code will show the speed difference. I just took your data and replicated it 1000 times...

x <- structure(list(ID = c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 3L, 3L), START = structure(c(10957, 
11048, 11062, 11201, 10971, 10988, 11048, 11109, 11139), class = "Date"), 
    END = structure(c(11047, 11108, 11169, 11261, 11047, 11031, 
    11062, 11123, 11153), class = "Date")), .Names = c("ID", 
"START", "END"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, 9L))

r <- 1000
y <- data.frame(ID=rep(x$ID, r) + rep(1:r, each=nrow(x))-1, START=rep(x$START, r), END=rep(x$END, r))

system.time( a1 <- smoothingEpisodes(y) )   # 2.95 seconds
system.time( a2 <- smoothingEpisodes3(y) )  # 0.10 seconds
all.equal( a1, a2 )