I am running into some memory allocation problems trying to replicate some data by groups using data.table and rep.
Here is some sample data:
ob1 <- as.data.frame(cbind(c(1999),c("THE","BLACK","DOG","JUMPED","OVER","RED","FENCE"),c(4)),stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
ob2 <- as.data.frame(cbind(c(2000),c("I","WALKED","THE","BLACK","DOG"),c(3)),stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
ob3 <- as.data.frame(cbind(c(2001),c("SHE","PAINTED","THE","RED","FENCE"),c(1)),stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
ob4 <- as.data.frame(cbind(c(2002),c("THE","YELLOW","HOUSE","HAS","BLACK","DOG","AND","RED","FENCE"),c(2)),stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
sample_data <- rbind(ob1,ob2,ob3,ob4)
colnames(sample_data) <- c("yr","token","multiple")
What I am trying to do is replicate the tokens (in the present order) by the multiple for each year.
The following code works and gives me the answer I want:
good_solution1 <- ddply(sample_data, "yr", function(x) data.frame(rep(x[,2],x[1,3])))
good_solution2 <- data.table(sample_data)[, rep(token,unique(multiple)),by = "yr"]
The issue is that when I scale this up to 40mm+ rows, I get into memory issues for both possible solutions.
If my understanding is correct, these solutions are essentially doing an rbind which allocates everytime.
Does anyone have a better solution?
I looked at set() for data.table but was running into issues because I wanted to keep the tokens in the same order for each replication.