Making "Deduplicated" Functions.

deduped

deduped contains one main function deduped() which speeds up slow, vectorized functions by only performing computations on the unique values of the input and expanding the results at the end. A convenience wrapper, with_deduped(), was added in version 0.3.0 to allow piping an existing expression.

Note: It only works on functions that preserve length and order.

Installation

You can install the released version of deduped from CRAN with:

install.packages("deduped")

And the development version from GitHub:

if(!requireNamespace("remotes")) install.packages("remotes")

remotes::install_github("orgadish/deduped")

Examples

Setup

library(deduped)
set.seed(0)

slow_tolower <- function(x) {
  for (i in x) {
    Sys.sleep(0.0005)
  }
  tolower(x)
}

deduped(...)

# Create a vector with significant duplication.
set.seed(1)
unique_vec <- sample(LETTERS, 5)
print(unique_vec)
#> [1] "Y" "D" "G" "A" "B"
duplicated_vec <- sample(rep(unique_vec, 100))
length(duplicated_vec)
#> [1] 500

system.time({  x1 <- slow_tolower(duplicated_vec)  })
#>    user  system elapsed 
#>    0.02    0.02    5.97


system.time({  x2 <- deduped(slow_tolower)(duplicated_vec)  })
#>    user  system elapsed 
#>    0.04    0.00    0.15
all.equal(x1, x2)
#> [1] TRUE

Note: As of version 0.3.0, you could also useslow_tolower(duplicated_vec) |> with_deduped().

deduped(lapply)(...)

deduped() can also be combined with lapply() or purrr::map().

set.seed(2)
unique_list <- lapply(1:3, function(j) sample(LETTERS, j, replace = TRUE))
str(unique_list)
#> List of 3
#>  $ : chr "U"
#>  $ : chr [1:2] "O" "F"
#>  $ : chr [1:3] "F" "H" "Q"

# Create a list with significant duplication.
duplicated_list <- sample(rep(unique_list, 50)) 
length(duplicated_list)
#> [1] 150

system.time({  y1 <- lapply(duplicated_list, slow_tolower)  })
#>    user  system elapsed 
#>    0.04    0.00    3.58
system.time({  y2 <- deduped(lapply)(duplicated_list, slow_tolower)  })
#>    user  system elapsed 
#>    0.00    0.00    0.09

all.equal(y1, y2)
#> [1] TRUE

deduped(fs::path_rel)(...)

deduped() is helpful on slow path functions like fs::path_rel().

set.seed(3)
top_path <- "x/y/z/"
unique_paths <- paste0(top_path, LETTERS, "/file.csv")
str(unique_paths)
#>  chr [1:26] "x/y/z/A/file.csv" "x/y/z/B/file.csv" "x/y/z/C/file.csv" ...

# Create a list with significant duplication.
dup_paths <- sample(rep(unique_paths, 500)) 
length(dup_paths)
#> [1] 13000

system.time({  y1 <- fs::path_rel(dup_paths, start=top_path)  })
#>    user  system elapsed 
#>    3.96    0.03    3.99
system.time({  y2 <- deduped(fs::path_rel)(dup_paths, start=top_path)  })
#>    user  system elapsed 
#>    0.01    0.00    0.01

all.equal(y1, y2)
#> [1] TRUE