Boosting R performance with the data.table package and other tools
The following two sections present several methods of enhancing the speed of data processing in R. The larger part is devoted to the excellent data.table package, which allows convenient and fast data transformations. At the very end of this section we also direct you to other sources, that elaborate, in more detail, on the particulars of faster and better optimized R code.
Fast data import and manipulation with the data.table package
In a chapter devoted to optimized and faster data processing in the R environment, we simply must spare a few pages for one, extremely efficient and flexible package called data.table. The package, developed by Dowle, Srinivasan, Short, and Lianoglou with further contributions from Saporta and Antonyan, took the primitive R data.frame concept one (huge) step forward and has made the lives of many R users so much easier since its release to the community.
The data.table library offers...
