[R] Timer on a function

[Bert Gunter]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 2:24 PM, Ramiro Barrantes
<ramiro at precisionbioassay.com> wrote:
>    Hello,
>
> I have a program that consists of a loop fitting a function over many models.  Sometimes the fitting on a particular model takes minutes to converge.  Is there a way that I can limit the amount of time that R spends on a given model:

AFAIK, no -- this is an OS level issue.

Of course, most iterative fitting procedures have controls for the
number of iterations, convergence criteria, etc. , but there is no
awareness of timing except when the OS is interrogated, e.g. by
?proc.time or ?system.time . Such calls would have to be built into
the fitting function or OS level services would have to be invoked to
run the R process with timing limitations built in. See e.g. ?Rscript
for one possible approach.

Corrections or clever tricks to get around these perceived limitations
welcomed, of course.

-- Bert

Cheers,
Bert
>
> say if my line is:
>
> fittingFunction( func, model.1)
>
> can I have some function:
>
> stopIfUnderTime(  fittingFunction( func, model.1) , 5 )
>
> where stopIfUnderTime will return the result if it finishes under 5 seconds, or NA otherwise.
>
> Is there anything like this?  (just looked through the web but did not find anything)
>
> Thanks,
> Ramiro
>
>
>
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>
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-- 

Bert Gunter
Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics

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