[R] Fast version of Fisher's Exact Test

[Steven McKinney]

Depends on how many other programs, and how large they are, and how much
RAM you have on your machine.  If I repeatedly run the example I used below, 
my R session shows 170MB of memory usage, not a huge amount relative to total
memory, and not a huge amount even for 32 bit R.  But if your system has 2 GB 
of RAM and 1.9 GB is consumed by other processes, then this example will cause 
swapping and speed will be reduced.

So figuring out a solution requires understanding what it is that is causing
the slowdown - not enough RAM, other programs competing for CPU cycles...

You can try switching to 64 bit R but unless your 32 bit R is loading some large
data objects, leaving little RAM, you won't see much of a difference.
If you start R, and do rm(list = ls()) to ensure no big data objects are using up
RAM, does the example below still take a long time?

You haven't mentioned what operating system you are using, how much RAM you have
or what sessionInfo() reports on your machine.  That information will help to
figure this out.



Steven McKinney

________________________________________
From: Jim Silverton [jim.silverton at gmail.com]
Sent: April 9, 2011 9:21 AM
To: Steven McKinney
Subject: Re: [R] Fast version of Fisher's Exact Test

I R 32 bit installed but my machine is 64 bit. Do I need to upgrade the R to 64 bit for it to run faster?



On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 6:44 PM, Steven McKinney <smckinney at bccrc.ca<mailto:smckinney at bccrc.ca>> wrote:
Do you mean a test something such as this?

> fisher.test(matrix(c(502,498,490, 510), nrow = 2))

       Fisher's Exact Test for Count Data

data:  matrix(c(502, 498, 490, 510), nrow = 2)
p-value = 0.6228
alternative hypothesis: true odds ratio is not equal to 1
95 percent confidence interval:
 0.8770113 1.2550998
sample estimates:
odds ratio
 1.049119

This runs quickly on my machine.

> system.time(fisher.test(matrix(c(502,498,490, 510), nrow = 2)))
  user  system elapsed
 0.008   0.001   0.010
> sessionInfo()
R version 2.12.2 (2011-02-25)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0/x86_64 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8/C/C/en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_2.12.2
>

Can you provide an example that is running slowly for you?

Steven McKinney

________________________________________
From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org<mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org> [r-help-bounces at r-project.org<mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org>] On Behalf Of Jim Silverton [jim.silverton at gmail.com<mailto:jim.silverton at gmail.com>]
Sent: April 8, 2011 9:43 AM
To: r-help at r-project.org<mailto:r-help at r-project.org>
Subject: Re: [R] Fast version of Fisher's Exact Test

Is anyone aware of a fast way of doing fisher's exact test for a series of 2
x 2 tables in R? The fisher.test is really slow if n1=1000 and n2 = 1000.

--
Thanks,
Jim.

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--
Thanks,
Jim.