How do I manipulate/access elements of an instance of “dist” class using core R?

Question

A basic/common class in R is called \"dist\", and is a relatively efficient representation of a symmetric distance matrix. Unlike a \"matrix\" object,

Answer 1

I don't have a straight answer to your question, but if you are using the Euclidian distance, have a look at the rdist function from the fields package. Its implementation (in Fortran) is faster than dist, and the output is of class matrix. At the very least, it shows that some developers have chosen to move away from this dist class, maybe for the exact reason you are mentioning. If you are concerned that using a full matrix for storing a symmetric matrix is an inefficient use of memory, you could convert it to a triangular matrix.

library("fields")
points <- matrix(runif(1000*100), nrow=1000, ncol=100)

system.time(dist1 <- dist(points))
#    user  system elapsed 
#   7.277   0.000   7.338 

system.time(dist2 <- rdist(points))
#   user  system elapsed 
#  2.756   0.060   2.851 

class(dist2)
# [1] "matrix"
dim(dist2)
# [1] 1000 1000
dist2[1:3, 1:3]
#              [,1]         [,2]         [,3]
# [1,] 0.0000000001 3.9529674733 3.8051198575
# [2,] 3.9529674733 0.0000000001 3.6552146293
# [3,] 3.8051198575 3.6552146293 0.0000000001