Tag: 3.2.2

labels.dendrogram in R 3.2.2 can be ~70 times faster (for trees with 1000 labels)

The recent release of R 3.2.2 came with a small (but highly valuable) improvement to the stats:::labels.dendrogram function. When working with dendrograms with (say) 1000 labels, the new function offers a 70 times speed improvement over the version of the function from R 3.2.1. This speedup is even better than the Rcpp version of labels.dendrogram from the dendextendRcpp package.

Here is some R code to demonstrate this speed improvement:

# IF you are missing an of these - they should be installed:
install.packages("dendextend")
install.packages("dendextendRcpp")
install.packages("microbenchmark")


# Getting labels from dendextendRcpp
labelsRcpp% dist %>% hclust %>% as.dendrogram
labels(dend)

And here are the results:

> microbenchmark(labels_3.2.1(dend), labels_3.2.2(dend), labelsRcpp(dend))
Unit: milliseconds
               expr        min         lq     median         uq       max neval
 labels_3.2.1(dend) 186.522968 189.395378 195.684164 208.328365 321.98368   100
 labels_3.2.2(dend)   2.604766   2.826776   2.891728   3.006792  21.24127   100
   labelsRcpp(dend)   3.825401   3.946904   3.999817   4.179552  11.22088   100
> 
> microbenchmark(labels_3.2.2(dend), order.dendrogram(dend))
Unit: microseconds
                   expr      min        lq   median        uq      max neval
     labels_3.2.2(dend) 2520.218 2596.0880 2678.677 2885.2890 9572.460   100
 order.dendrogram(dend)  665.191  712.2235  954.951  996.1055 2268.812   100

As we can see, the new labels function (in R 3.2.2) is about 70 times faster than the older version (from R 3.2.1). When only wanting something like the number of labels, using length on order.dendrogram will still be (about 3 times) faster than using labels.

This improvement is expected to speedup various functions in the dendextend R package (a package for visualizing, adjusting, and comparing dendrograms, which heavily relies on labels.dendrogram). We expect to get even better speedup improvements for larger trees.

dend1000

R 3.2.2 is released

R 3.2.2 (codename “Fire Safety”) was released last weekend. You can get the latest binaries version from here. (or the .tar.gz source code from here). The full list of new features and bug fixes is provided below.

SOME OF THE CHANGES

I personally found two things particularly interesting in this release:

  1. setInternet2(TRUE) is now the default for windows (which will save people from getting “Error in file(con, “r”)” when using the installr package)
  2. The dendrogram method of labels() is much more efficient for large dendrograms since it now uses rapply(). This is expected to speedup various functions in the dendextend R package (a package for visualizing, adjusting, and comparing dendrograms, which heavily relies on labels.dendrogram).

Also, David Smith (from Revolution/Microsoft) highlighted in his post several of the updates in R 3.2.2 he found interesting – mentioning how the new default for accessing the web with R will rely on the HTTPS protocol, and of improving the accuracy in the extreme tails of the t and hypergeometric distributions.

Upgrading to R 3.2.2 on Windows

If you are using Windows you can easily upgrade to the latest version of R using the installr package. Simply run the following code in Rgui:

install.packages("installr") # install 
setInternet2(TRUE)
installr::updateR() # updating R.

Running “updateR()” will detect if there is a new R version available, and if so it will download+install it (etc.). There is also a step by step tutorial (with screenshots) on how to upgrade R on Windows, using the installr package.

I try to keep the installr package updated and useful, so if you have any suggestions or remarks on the package – you are invited to open an issue in the github page.

CHANGES IN R 3.2.2:

SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES

  • It is now easier to use secure downloads from https:// URLs on builds which support them: no longer do non-default options need to be selected to do so. In particular, packages can be installed from repositories which offer https:// URLs, and those listed by setRepositories()now do so (for some of their mirrors).Support for https:// URLs is available on Windows, and on other platforms if support forlibcurl was compiled in and if that supports the https protocol (system installations can be expected to do). So https:// support can be expected except on rather old OSes (an example being OS X ‘Snow Leopard’, where a non-system version of libcurl can be used).(Windows only) The default method for accessing URLs via download.file() and url() has been changed to be "wininet" using Windows API calls. This changes the way proxies need to be set and security settings made: there have been some reports of sites being inaccessible under the new default method (but the previous methods remain available).

NEW FEATURES

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