R Programming By Example

Using specialized packages for performance

Another good way to increase the performance of your implementations is to look for specialized functions published in CRAN packages or elsewhere. Before you go about changing your own code, take a look and see if you can find a very efficient implementation somewhere else. There's tremendous variation in CRAN packages' quality and speed, but leveraging them can definitely save you a lot of time.

Two very powerful packages to help you develop efficient implementations are the data.table and dplyr packages. They can provide efficient ways of dealing with data frames, and in the case of dplyr other objects as well. The Basic Linear Algebra Subprogram (BLAS) library can also be very helpful when performing ...