R: Data Analysis and Visualization
by Tony Fischetti, Brett Lantz, Jaynal Abedin, Hrishi V. Mittal, Bater Makhabel, Edina Berlinger, Ferenc Illés, Milán Badics, Ádám Banai, Gergely Daróczi, Barbara Dömötör, Gergely Gabler, Dániel Havran, Péter Juhász, István Margitai, Balázs Márkus, Péter Medvegyev, Julia Molnár, Balázs Árpád Szucs, Ágnes Tuza, Tamás Vadász, Kata Váradi, Ágnes Vidovics-Dancs
Using optimized packages
Many of the functionalities in base R have alternative implementations available in contributed packages. Quite often, these packages offer a faster or less memory-intensive substitute for the base R equivalent. For example, in addition to adding a ton of extra functionality, the glmnet package performs regression far faster than glm in my experience.
For faster data import, you might be able to use fread from the data.table package or the read_* family of functions from the readr package. It is not uncommon for data import tasks that used to take several hours to take only a few minutes with these read functions.
For common data manipulation tasks—like merging (joining), conditional selection, sorting, and so on—you will ...
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