Lecture 5: Flow control

STAT598z: Intro. to computing for statistics

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Vinayak Rao

Department of Statistics, Purdue University

Statements in R

• separated by semicolons or newlines
• grouped by curly braces ‘{’ and ‘}’ into blocks

semicolons indicate the end of a statement

newlines not necessarily

Whenever R encounters a syntactically correct statement it executes it and a value is returned

The value of a block is the value of the last statement

if statements

Allow conditional execution of statements

if( condition ) {
   statement_block1 # executed if condition is true
 } else {           # else is optional
   statement_block2
 }

The value of condition is coerced to logical

• If integer or numeric, 0 is FALSE , rest are true
• Using other modes isn’t really recommended

If the value has length more than one, only the first is used

Since else is optional, don’t put it on its own line!

Can disperse with braces for one-line statements:

if(condition) statement1 else statement2

if/else statements can be nested:

if( condition1 ) {
   statements1
 } else if( condition2 ) {
   statements2
 } else {
   statements3
 }

p <- rnorm(1)
if( p >= 0 ) {
  p_logp <- p * log(p)
} else {
  p_logp <- 0 # Assuming p >= 0
}
print(c(p,p_logp))

if( p > 0 ) p_logp <- p * log(p) else p_logp <- 0

if is a function that returns values, so we can also write

p_logp <- if( p > 0 ) p * log(p) else 0

# Less clear:
p_logp <- 'if'( p > 0, {p * log(p)}, 0)

Logical operators

! logical negation

& and &&: logical ‘and’ | and || : logical ‘or’

& and | perform elementwise comparisons on vectors

&& and || :

• evaluate from left to right
• look at first element of each vector
• evaluation proceeds only until the result is determined
• used inside if conditions

Also useful are xor(), any(), all()

c(TRUE, TRUE) & c(TRUE, FALSE)

c(TRUE, TRUE) && c(TRUE, FALSE)

NA | c(TRUE, FALSE)

TRUE && (pi >1) && {print("Hello"); TRUE}

TRUE && (pi == 3.14) && {print("Hello"); TRUE}

c(TRUE, TRUE) & c(TRUE, FALSE) & {print("Hello!"); TRUE}

c(TRUE, TRUE) & c(FALSE, FALSE) & {print("Hello!"); TRUE}

We will look at lazy evaluation later

Explicit looping: for(), while() and repeat()

for(elem in vect) {  # Can be vector or list over
   Do_stuff_with_elem # successive elements of vect
 }

x <- 0
for(ii in 1:50000) x <- x + log(ii)    # Horrible

x <- sum(log(1:50000))  # Much more simple and efficient!

system.time({x<-0; for(i in 1:50000) x <- x + log(i)})

system.time( x <- sum(log(1:50000)) )

An aside on increasing vector lengths

system.time({x<-0; for(i in 1:10000) x[i] <- i})
mean(x)

system.time({x<-rep(0,10000); for(i in 1:10000) x[i] <- i })
mean(x)

Vectorization

Vectorization allows concise and fast loop-free code

Example: Entropy $H(p) = −\sum_{i=1}^{|p|} p_i \log p_i$ of a prob. distrib.

p <- c(.0,.5,.5)

H <- -sum( p * log(p) ); print(H) # Vectorized but wrong (p[i] == 0?)

H <- 0
for(ii in 1:length(p)) # Correct but slow
  if(p[ii] > 0) H <- H - p[ii] * log(p[ii])

pos <- p > 0; sum(p[pos])

Vectorization isn’t always possible though

• when contents of the loop are complicated
• when future iterations depend on the past
• sometimes the cost in human-time of complicated vectorization isn’t worth the saved CPU cycles

See the third and fourth Circles in The R Inferno, Patrick Burns

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" -Donald Knuth

Vectorization via ifelse()

ifelse() has syntax:

ifelse(bool_vec, true_vec, false_vec)

Returns a vector of length equal to bool_vec whose

• $i^{th}$ element is true_vec[i] if bool_vec[i] is TRUE
• $i^{th}$ element is false_vec[i] if bool_vec[i] is FALSE
• true_vec and false_vec are recycled if necessary

Entropy revisited:

H <- -sum(ifelse( p > 0, p * log(p), 0 ))

ifelse() has syntax:

ifelse(bool_vec, true_vec, false_vec)

ifelse is not lazy, usually evaluates all true_vec and false_vec (unless bool_vec is all TRUE or FALSE)

x <- c(6:-4)
sqrt(x) # gives warning

sqrt(ifelse(x >= 0, x, NA)) # no warning

## Note: the following also gives the warning !
ifelse(x >= 0, sqrt(x), NA)

I prefer to subset vectors

While loops

while( condition ) {
   stuff # Repeat while condition evaluates to TRUE
 }

If stuff doesn’t affect condition , we loop forever.

Then, we need a break statement. Useful if many conditions

while(TRUE) { # Or use ‘repeat { ... }’
   stuff1
   if( condition1 ) break
   stuff2
   if( condition2 ) break
 }

i <- 4
while( i > 0 ) {
  print(i)
  i <- i - 1
}

i <- 5
while( i <- i - 1) { # while condition has a ‘side effect’
  print(i)           # Not recommended
}

i <- 4
while( { print(i); i <- i - 1} ) {}
# Correct but ridiculous

Might be useful if the block is a function

break(), next() and switch()

break() transfers control to first statement outside loop

next() halts current iteration and advances looping index

Both these commands apply to the innermost loop

Useful to avoid writing up complicated conditions

switch() is another potentially useful alternative to if

See documentation (I don’t use it much)

The *apply family

Useful functions for repeated operations on vectors, lists etc.

Note (Circle 4 of The R inferno):

• These are not vectorized operations but are loop-hiding
• Cleaner code, but comparable speeds to explicit loops

# Calc. mean of each element of my_list
rslt_list <- lapply(my_list, FUN = mean)

Stackexchange has a nice summary

The plyr package (discussed later) is nicer