Reputation: 1081
I am trying to simulate monthly panels of data where one variable depends on lagged values of that variable in R. My solution is extremely slow. I need around 1000 samples of 2545 individuals, each of whom is observed monthly over many years, but the first sample took my computer 8.5 hours to construct. How can I make this faster?
I start by creating an unbalanced panel of people with different birth dates, monthly ages, and variables xbsmall
and error
that will be compared to determine the Outcome
. All of the code in the first block is just data setup.
# Setup:
library(plyr)
# Would like to have 2545 people (nPerson).
#Instead use 4 for testing.
nPerson = 4
# Minimum and maximum possible ages and birth dates
AgeMin = 10
AgeMax = 50
BornMin = 1950
BornMax = 1963
# Person-specific characteristics
ind =
data.frame(
id = 1:nPerson,
BornYear = floor(runif(length(1:nPerson), min=BornMin, max=BornMax+1)),
BornMonth = ceiling(runif(length(1:nPerson), min=0, max=12))
)
# Make an unbalanced panel of people over age 10 up to year 1986
# panel = ddply(ind, ~id, transform, AgeMonths = BornMonth)
panel = ddply(ind, ~id, transform, AgeMonths = (AgeMin*12):((1986-BornYear)*12 + 12-BornMonth))
# Set up some random variables to approximate the data generating process
panel$xbsmall = rnorm(dim(panel)[1], mean=-.3, sd=.45)
# Standard normal error for probit
panel$error = rnorm(dim(panel)[1])
# Placeholders
panel$xb = rep(0, dim(panel)[1])
panel$Outcome = rep(0, dim(panel)[1])
Now that we have data, here is the part that is slow (around a second on my computer for only 4 observations but hours for thousands of observations). Each month, a person gets two draws (xbsmall
and error
) from two different normal distributions (these were done above), and Outcome == 1
if xbsmall > error
. However, if Outcome
equals 1 in the previous month, then Outcome
in the current month equals 1 if xbsmall + 4.47 > error
. I use xb = xbsmall+4.47
in the code below (xb
is the "linear predictor" in a probit model). I ignore the first month for each person for simplicity. For your information, this is simulating a probit DGP (but that is not necessary to know to solve the problem of computation speed).
# Outcome == 1 if and only if xb > -error
# The hard part: xb includes information about the previous month's outcome
start_time = Sys.time()
for(i in 1:nPerson){
# Determine the range of monthly ages to loop over for this person
AgeMonthMin = min(panel$AgeMonths[panel$id==i], na.rm=T)
AgeMonthMax = max(panel$AgeMonths[panel$id==i], na.rm=T)
# Loop over the monthly ages for this person and determine the outcome
for(t in (AgeMonthMin+1):AgeMonthMax){
# Indicator for whether Outcome was 1 last month
panel$Outcome1LastMonth[panel$id==i & panel$AgeMonths==t] = panel$Outcome[panel$id==i & panel$AgeMonths==t-1]
# xb = xbsmall + 4.47 if Outcome was 1 last month
# Otherwise, xb = xbsmall
panel$xb[panel$id==i & panel$AgeMonths==t] = with(panel[panel$id==i & panel$AgeMonths==t,], xbsmall + 4.47*Outcome1LastMonth)
# Outcome == 1 if xb > 0
panel$Outcome[panel$id==i & panel$AgeMonths==t] =
ifelse(panel$xb[panel$id==i & panel$AgeMonths==t] > - panel$error[panel$id==i & panel$AgeMonths==t], 1, 0)
}
}
end_time = Sys.time()
end_time - start_time
My thoughts for reducing computer time:
cumsum()
plyr::ddpl()
or dplyr::gather_by()
Outcome
at each monthly age (say, the mode) and somehow adjust values that do not match the previous month. This would work better in my real application because xbsmall has a very clear trend in age.Upvotes: 1
Views: 813
Reputation: 13108
One approach is to use a split-apply-combine method. I take out the for(t in (AgeMonthMin+1):AgeMonthMax)
loop and put the contents in a function:
generate_outcome <- function(x) {
AgeMonthMin <- min(x$AgeMonths, na.rm = TRUE)
AgeMonthMax <- max(x$AgeMonths, na.rm = TRUE)
for (i in 2:(AgeMonthMax - AgeMonthMin + 1)){
x$xb[i] <- x$xbsmall[i] + 4.47 * x$Outcome[i - 1]
x$Outcome[i] <- ifelse(x$xb[i] > - x$error[i], 1, 0)
}
x
}
where x
is a dataframe for one person. This allows us to simplify the panel$id==i & panel$AgeMonths==t
construct. Now we can just do
out <- lapply(split(panel, panel$id), generate_outcome)
out <- do.call(rbind, out)
and all.equal(panel$Outcome, out$Outcome)
returns TRUE
. Computing 100 persons took 1.8 seconds using this method, compared to 1.5 minutes in the original code.
Upvotes: 1