Posts Tagged ‘ system.time ’

Computational Time of Predictive Models

September 25, 2015
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Computational Time of Predictive Models

Tuesday, at the end of my 5-hour crash course on machine learning for actuaries, Pierre asked me an interesting question about computational time of different techniques. I’ve been presenting the philosophy of various algorithm, but I forgot to mention computational time. I wanted to try several classification algorithms on the dataset used to illustrate the techniques > rm(list=ls()) > myocarde=read.table( "http://freakonometrics.free.fr/myocarde.csv", head=TRUE,sep=";") > levels(myocarde$PRONO)=c("Death","Survival") But the dataset is rather small,…

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quantile functions: mileage may vary

May 11, 2015
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quantile functions: mileage may vary

When experimenting with various quantiles functions in R, I was shocked [ok this is a bit excessive, let us say surprised] by how widely the execution times would vary. To the point of blaming a completely different feature of R. Borrowing from Charlie Geyer’s webpage on the topic of probability distributions in R, here is […]

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take those hats off [from R]!

May 4, 2015
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take those hats off [from R]!

This is presumably obvious to most if not all R programmers, but I became aware today of a hugely (?) delaying tactic in my R codes. I was working with Jean-Michel and Natesh [who are visiting at the moment] and when coding an MCMC run I was telling them that I usually preferred to code […]

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scale acceleration

April 23, 2015
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scale acceleration

Kate Lee pointed me to a rather surprising inefficiency in matlab, exploited in Sylvia Früwirth-Schnatter’s bayesf package: running a gamma simulation by rgamma(n,a,b) takes longer and sometimes much longer than rgamma(n,a,1)/b, the latter taking advantage of the scale nature of b. I wanted to check on my own whether or not R faced the same […]

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R/Rmetrics in Paris [alas!]

June 29, 2014
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R/Rmetrics in Paris [alas!]

Today I gave a talk on Bayesian model choice in a fabulous 13th Century former monastery in the Latin Quarter of Paris… It is the Collège des Bernardins, close to Jussieu and Collège de France, unbelievably hidden to the point I was not aware of its existence despite having studied and worked in Jussieu since […]

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optimising accept-reject

November 20, 2012
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optimising accept-reject

I spotted on R-bloggers a post discussing optimising the efficiency of programming accept-reject algorithms. While it is about SAS programming, and apparently supported by the SAS company, there are two interesting features with this discussion. The first one is about avoiding the dreaded loop in accept-reject algorithms. For instance, taking the case of the truncated-at-one [...]

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