I need to compute a similarity measure call the Dice coefficient over large matrices (600,000 x 500) of binary vectors in R. For speed I use C / Rcpp. The function runs great but as I am not a computer scientist by background I would like to know if it could run faster. This code is suitable for parallelisation but I have no experience parallelising C code.
The Dice coefficient is a simple measure of similarity / dissimilarity (depending how you take it). It is intended to compare asymmetric binary vectors, meaning one of the combination (usually 0-0) is not important and agreement (1-1 pairs) have more weight than disagreement (1-0 or 0-1 pairs). Imagine the following contingency table:
1 0
1 a b
0 c d
The Dice coef is: (2*a) / (2*a +b + c)
Here is my Rcpp implementation:
library(Rcpp)
cppFunction('
NumericMatrix dice(NumericMatrix binaryMat){
int nrows = binaryMat.nrow(), ncols = binaryMat.ncol();
NumericMatrix results(ncols, ncols);
for(int i=0; i < ncols-1; i++){ // columns fixed
for(int j=i+1; j < ncols; j++){ // columns moving
double a = 0;
double d = 0;
for (int l = 0; l < nrows; l++) {
if(binaryMat(l, i)>0){
if(binaryMat(l, j)>0){
a++;
}
}else{
if(binaryMat(l, j)<1){
d++;
}
}
}
// compute Dice coefficient
double abc = nrows - d;
double bc = abc - a;
results(j,i) = (2*a) / (2*a + bc);
}
}
return wrap(results);
}
')
And here is a running example:
x <- rbinom(1:200000, 1, 0.5)
X <- matrix(x, nrow = 200, ncol = 1000)
system.time(dice(X))
user system elapsed
0.814 0.000 0.814