Sum of subvectors of a vector in R

Question

Given a vector x of length k, I would like to obtain a k by k matrix X where X[i,j] is the sum of x[i] + ... + x[j]. The

Answer 1

Here's another approach which seems to be significantly faster than OP's for loop (by factor ~30) and faster than the other answers currently present (by factor >=18):

n <- 5
x <- 1:5
z <- lapply(1:n, function(i) cumsum(x[i:n]))
m <- mapply(function(y, l) c(rep(NA, n-l), y), z, lengths(z))
m[upper.tri(m)] <- t(m)[upper.tri(m)]
m

#     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
#[1,]    1    3    6   10   15
#[2,]    3    2    5    9   14
#[3,]    6    5    3    7   12
#[4,]   10    9    7    4    9
#[5,]   15   14   12    9    5

Benchmarks (scroll down for results)

library(microbenchmark)
n <- 100
x <- 1:n

f1 <- function() {
  X <- matrix(0,n,n)
  for(i in 1:n) {
    for(j in 1:n) {
      X[i,j] <- sum(x[i:j])
    }
  }
  X
}

f2 <- function() {
  mySum <- function(i,j) sum(x[i:j])
  outer(1:n, 1:n, Vectorize(mySum))
}

f3 <- function() {
  matrix(apply(expand.grid(1:n, 1:n), 1, function(y) sum(x[y[2]:y[1]])), n, n)
}

f4 <- function() {
  z <- lapply(1:n, function(i) cumsum(x[i:n]))
  m <- mapply(function(y, l) c(rep(NA, n-l), y), z, lengths(z))
  m[upper.tri(m)] <- t(m)[upper.tri(m)]
  m
}

f5 <- function() {
  X <- diag(x)
  for(i in 1:(n-1)) {
    for(j in 1:(n-i)){
      X[j+i,j] <- X[j,j+i] <- X[j+i,j+i] + X[j+i-1,j]
    }  
  }
  X
}

microbenchmark(f1(), f2(), f3(), f4(), f5(), times = 25L, unit = "relative")
#Unit: relative
# expr      min       lq     mean   median       uq      max neval
# f1() 29.90113 29.01193 30.82411 31.15412 32.51668 35.93552    25
# f2() 29.46394 30.93101 31.79682 31.88397 34.52489 28.74846    25
# f3() 56.05807 53.82641 53.63785 55.36704 55.62439 45.94875    25
# f4()  1.00000  1.00000  1.00000  1.00000  1.00000  1.00000    25
# f5() 16.30136 17.46371 18.86259 17.87850 21.19914 23.68106    25

all.equal(f1(), f2())
#[1] TRUE
all.equal(f1(), f3())
#[1] TRUE
all.equal(f1(), f4())
#[1] TRUE
all.equal(f1(), f5())
#[1] TRUE

Updated with the edited function by Neal Fultz.