collapse 1.3.2, released mid September 2020, is a minor update:
Fixed a small bug in fNdistinct for grouped distinct value counts on logical vectors.
Additional security for ftransform, which now efficiently checks the names of the data and replacement arguments for uniqueness, and also allows computing and transforming list-columns.
Added function ftransformv to facilitate transforming selected columns with function - a very efficient replacement for dplyr::mutate_if and dplyr::mutate_at.
frename now allows additional arguments to be passed to a renaming function.
collapse 1.3.1, released end of August 2020, is a patch for v1.3.0 that takes care of some unit test failures on certain operating systems (mostly because of numeric precision issues). It provides no changes to the code or functionality.
collapse 1.3.0, released mid August 2020, is another major update:
dapply and BY now drop all unnecessary attributes if return = "matrix" or return = "data.frame" are explicitly requested (the default return = "same" still seeks to preserve the input data structure).
unlist2d now saves integer rownames if row.names = TRUE and a list of matrices without rownames is passed, and id.factor = TRUE generates a normal factor not an ordered factor. It is however possible to write id.factor = "ordered" to get an ordered factor id.
fdiff argument logdiff renamed to log, and taking logs is now done in R (reduces size of C++ code and does not generate as many NaN’s). logdiff may still be used, but it may be deactivated in the future. Also in the matrix and data.frame methods for flag, fdiff and fgrowth, columns are only stub-renamed if more than one lag/difference/growth rate is computed.
Added fnth for fast (grouped, weighted) n’th element/quantile computations.
Added roworder(v) and colorder(v) for fast row and column reordering.
Added frename and setrename for fast and flexible renaming (by reference).
Added function fungroup, as replacement for dplyr::ungroup, intended for use with fgroup_by.
The shortcut gvr was created for get_vars(..., regex = TRUE). Also a helper .c was introduced for non-standard concatenation (i.e. .c(a, b) == c("a", "b")).
fmedian now supports weights, computing a decently fast (grouped) weighted median based on radix ordering.
fmode now has the option to compute min and max mode, the default is still simply the first mode.
fwithin now supports quasi-demeaning (added argument theta) and can thus be used to manually estimate random-effects models.
fmode and fNdistinct have become a bit faster.
fgroup_by now preserves data.table’s.
funique is now generic with a default vector and data.frame method, providing fast unique values and rows of data. The default was changed to sort = FALSE.
ftransform now also supports a data.frame as replacement argument, which automatically replaces matching columns and adds unmatched ones. Also ftransform<- was created as a more formal replacement method for this feature.
collap columns selected through cols argument are returned in the order selected if keep.col.order = FALSE. Argument sort.row is depreciated, and replace by argument sort. In addition the decreasing and na.last arguments were added and handed down to GRP.default.
radixorder ‘sorted’ attribute is now always attached.
stats::D which is masked when collapse is attached, is now preserved through methods D.expression and D.call.
GRP option call = FALSE to omit a call to match.call -> minor performance improvement.
Several small performance improvements through rewriting some internal helper functions in C and reworking some R code.
Performance improvements for some helper functions, setRownames / setColnames, na_insert etc.
Increased scope of testing statistical functions. The functionality of the package is now secured by 7700 unit tests covering all central bits and pieces.
collapse 1.2.1, released end of May 2020, is a patch for v1.2.0:
Minor fixes for 1.2.0 issues that prevented correct installation on Mac OS X and a vignette rebuilding error on solaris.
fmode.grouped_df with groups and weights now saves the sum of the weights instead of the max (this makes more sense as the max only applies if all elements are unique).
collapse 1.2.0, released mid May 2020, is a major update of the package - changes and additions:
grouped_df methods for fast statistical functions now always attach the grouping variables to the output in aggregations, unless argument keep.group_vars = FALSE. (formerly grouping variables were only attached if also present in the data. Code hinged on this feature should be adjusted)
qF ordered argument default was changed to ordered = FALSE, and the NA level is only added if na.exclude = FALSE. Thus qF now behaves exactly like as.factor.
Recode is depreciated in favor of recode_num and recode_char, it will be removed soon. Similarly replace_non_finite was renamed to replace_Inf.
In mrtl and mctl the argument ret was renamed return and now takes descriptive character arguments (the previous version was a direct C++ export and unsafe, code written with these functions should be adjusted).
GRP argument order is depreciated in favor of argument decreasing. order can still be used but will be removed at some point.
flag where unused factor levels caused a group size error.Added a suite of functions for fast data manipulation:
fselect selects variables from a data frame and is equivalent but much faster than dplyr::select.fsubset is a much faster version of base::subset to subset vectors, matrices and data.frames. The function ss was also added as a faster alternative to [.data.frame.ftransform is a much faster update of base::transform, to transform data frames by adding, modifying or deleting columns. The function settransform does all of that by reference.fcompute is equivalent to ftransform but returns a new data frame containing only the columns computed from an existing one.na_omit is a much faster and enhanced version of base::na.omit.replace_NA efficiently replaces missing values in multi-type data.Added function fgroup_by as a much faster version of dplyr::group_by based on collapse grouping. It attaches a ‘GRP’ object to a data frame, but only works with collapse’s fast functions. This allows dplyr like manipulations that are fully collapse based and thus significantly faster, i.e. data %>% fgroup_by(g1,g2) %>% fselect(cola,colb) %>% fmean. Note that data %>% dplyr::group_by(g1,g2) %>% dplyr::select(cola,colb) %>% fmean still works, in which case the dplyr ‘group’ object is converted to ‘GRP’ as before. However data %>% fgroup_by(g1,g2) %>% dplyr::summarize(...) does not work.
Added function varying to efficiently check the variation of multi-type data over a dimension or within groups.
Added function radixorder, same as base::order(..., method = "radix") but more accessible and with built-in grouping features.
Added functions seqid and groupid for generalized run-length type id variable generation from grouping and time variables. seqid in particular strongly facilitates lagging / differencing irregularly spaced panels using flag, fdiff etc.
Faster grouping with GRP and faster factor generation with added radix method + automatic dispatch between hash and radix method. qF is now ~ 5x faster than as.factor on character and around 30x faster on numeric data. Also qG was enhanced.
Further slight speed tweaks here and there.
collap now provides more control for weighted aggregations with additional arguments w, keep.w and wFUN to aggregate the weights as well. The defaults are keep.w = TRUE and wFUN = fsum. A specialty of collap remains that keep.by and keep.w also work for external objects passed, so code of the form collap(data, by, FUN, catFUN, w = data$weights) will now have an aggregated weights vector in the first column.
qsu now also allows weights to be passed in formula i.e. qsu(data, by = ~ group, pid = ~ panelid, w = ~ weights).
fdiff now supports quasi-differences i.e. \(x_t - \rho x_{t-1}\) and quasi-log differences i.e. \(log(x_t) - \rho log(x_{t-1})\). an arbitrary \(\rho\) can be supplied.
Added a Dlog operator for faster access to log-differences.
fgrowth has a scale argument, the default is scale = 100 which provides growth rates in percentage terms (as before), but this may now be changed.
All statistical and transformation functions now have a hidden list method, so they can be applied to unclassed list-objects as well. An error is however provided in grouped operations with unequal-length columns.
collapse 1.1.0 released early April 2020 - some small fixes and additions:
Fixed remaining gcc10, LTO and valgrind issues in C/C++ code, and added some more tests (there are now ~ 5300 tests ensuring that collapse statistical functions perform as expected).
Fixed the issue that supplying an unnamed list to GRP(), i.e. GRP(list(v1, v2)) would give an error. Unnamed lists are now automatically named ‘Group.1’, ‘Group.2’, etc…
Fixed an issue where aggregating by a single id in collap() (i.e. collap(data, ~ id1)), the id would be coded as factor in the aggregated data.frame. All variables including id’s now retain their class and attributes in the aggregated data.
Added weights (w) argument to fsum and fprod. Note: fmedian will also support weights as soon as I am able to implement a sufficiently fast (i.e. linear time) algorithm. I also hope to introduce (weighted) quantiles. I am happy for any help with these features.
Added an argument mean = 0 to fwithin / W. This allows simple and grouped centering on an arbitrary mean, 0 being the default. For grouped centering mean = "overall.mean" can be specified, which will center data on the overall mean of the data. The logical argument add.global.mean = TRUE used to toggle this in collapse 1.0.0 is therefore depreciated.
Added arguments mean = 0 (the default) and sd = 1 (the default) to fscale / STD. These arguments now allow to (group) scale and center data to an arbitrary mean and standard deviation. Setting mean = FALSE will just scale data while preserving the mean(s). Special options for grouped scaling are mean = "overall.mean" (same as fwithin / W), and sd = "within.sd", which will scale the data such that the standard deviation of each group is equal to the within- standard deviation (= the standard deviation computed on the group-centered data). Thus group scaling a panel-dataset with mean = "overall.mean" and sd = "within.sd" harmonizes the data across all groups in terms of both mean and variance. The fast algorithm for variance calculation toggled with stable.algo = FALSE was removed from fscale. Welford’s numerically stable algorithm used by default is fast enough for all practical purposes. The fast algorithm is still available for fvar and fsd.
Added the modulus (%%) and subtract modulus (-%%) operations to TRA().
Added the function finteraction, for fast interactions, and as.character_factor to coerce a factor, or all factors in a list, to character (analogous to as.numeric_factor). Also exported the function ckmatch, for matching with error message showing non-matched elements.
First version of the package featuring only the functions collap and qsu based on code shared by Sebastian Martin Krantz on R-devel, February 2019.
Major rework of the package using Rcpp and data.table internals, introduction of fast statistical functions and operators and expansion of the scope of the package to a broad set of data transformation and exploration tasks. Several iterations of enhancing speed of R code used. Seamless integration of collapse with dplyr, plm and data.table. CRAN release of collapse 1.0.0 on 19th March 2020.