I'm working on a text multi-class classification project and I need to build the document / term matrices and train and test in R language.
I already have datasets that don't fit in the limited dimensionality of the base matrix class in R and would need to build big sparse matrices to be able to classify for example, 100k tweets. I am using the quanteda package, as it has been for now more useful and reliable than the package tm, where creating a DocumentTermMatrix with a dictionary, makes the process incredibly memory hungry with small datasets. Currently, as I said, I use quanteda to build the equivalent Document Term Matrix container that later on I transform into a data.frame to perform the training.
I want to know if there is a way to build such big matrices. I have been reading about the bigmemory package that allows this kind of container but I am not sure it will work with caret for the later classification. Overall I want to understand the problem and build a workaround to be able to work with bigger datasets, as the RAM is not a (big) problem (32GB) but I'm trying to find a way to do it and I feel completely lost about it.