Calculate Euclidean distance matrix using a big.matrix object

Question

I have an object of class big.matrix in R with dimension 778844 x 2. The values are all integers (kilometres). My objective is to calc

Answer 1

Here is a way using RcppArmadillo. Much of this is very similar to the RcppGallery example. This will return a big.matrix with the associated pairwise (by row) euclidean distances. I like to wrap my big.matrix functions in a wrapper function to create a cleaner syntax (i.e. avoid the @address and other initializations.

Note - as we are using bigmemory (and therefore concerned with RAM usage) I have this example returned the N-1 x N-1 matrix of only lower triangular elements. You could modify this but this is what I threw together.

euc_dist.cpp

// To enable the functionality provided by Armadillo's various macros,
// simply include them before you include the RcppArmadillo headers.
#define ARMA_NO_DEBUG

#include <RcppArmadillo.h>
// [[Rcpp::depends(RcppArmadillo, BH, bigmemory)]]

using namespace Rcpp;
using namespace arma;

// The following header file provides the definitions for the BigMatrix
// object
#include <bigmemory/BigMatrix.h>

// C++11 plugin
// [[Rcpp::plugins(cpp11)]]

template <typename T>
void BigArmaEuclidean(const Mat<T>& inBigMat, Mat<T> outBigMat) {

  int W = inBigMat.n_rows;

  for(int i = 0; i < W - 1; i++){
      for(int j=i+1; j < W; j++){
          outBigMat(j-1,i) = sqrt(sum(pow((inBigMat.row(i) - inBigMat.row(j)),2)));
      }
  }
}

// [[Rcpp::export]]
void BigArmaEuc(SEXP pInBigMat, SEXP pOutBigMat) {
  // First we tell Rcpp that the object we've been given is an external
  // pointer.
  XPtr<BigMatrix> xpMat(pInBigMat);
  XPtr<BigMatrix> xpOutMat(pOutBigMat);


  int type = xpMat->matrix_type();
  switch(type) {
      case 1:
        BigArmaEuclidean(
            arma::Mat<char>((char *)xpMat->matrix(), xpMat->nrow(), xpMat->ncol(), false),
            arma::Mat<char>((char *)xpOutMat->matrix(), xpOutMat->nrow(), xpOutMat->ncol(), false)
        );
        return;

      case 2:
        BigArmaEuclidean(
          arma::Mat<short>((short *)xpMat->matrix(), xpMat->nrow(), xpMat->ncol(), false),
          arma::Mat<short>((short *)xpOutMat->matrix(), xpOutMat->nrow(), xpOutMat->ncol(), false)
        );
        return;

      case 4:
        BigArmaEuclidean(
          arma::Mat<int>((int *)xpMat->matrix(), xpMat->nrow(), xpMat->ncol(), false),
          arma::Mat<int>((int *)xpOutMat->matrix(), xpOutMat->nrow(), xpOutMat->ncol(), false)
        );
        return;

      case 8:
        BigArmaEuclidean(
          arma::Mat<double>((double *)xpMat->matrix(), xpMat->nrow(), xpMat->ncol(), false),
          arma::Mat<double>((double *)xpOutMat->matrix(), xpOutMat->nrow(), xpOutMat->ncol(), false)
        );
        return;

      default:
        // We should never get here, but it resolves compiler warnings.
        throw Rcpp::exception("Undefined type for provided big.matrix");
  }

}

My little wrapper

bigMatrixEuc <- function(bigMat){
    zeros <- big.matrix(nrow = nrow(bigMat)-1,
                        ncol = nrow(bigMat)-1,
                        init = 0,
                        type = typeof(bigMat))
    BigArmaEuc(bigMat@address, zeros@address)
    return(zeros)
}

The test

library(Rcpp)
sourceCpp("euc_dist.cpp")

library(bigmemory)

set.seed(123)
mat <- matrix(rnorm(16), 4)
bm <- as.big.matrix(mat)

# Call new euclidean function
bm_out <- bigMatrixEuc(bm)[]

# pull out the matrix elements for out purposes
distMat <- as.matrix(dist(mat))
distMat[upper.tri(distMat, diag=TRUE)] <- 0
distMat <- distMat[2:4, 1:3]

# check if identical 
all.equal(bm_out, distMat, check.attributes = FALSE)
[1] TRUE