SOCR ≫ DSPA ≫ DSPA2 Topics ≫

1 Specialized Machine Learning Topics

Depending on the specific hardware, operating system, and versions of R and Python installed on the computer, some of the following settings may be useful to support the subsequent integration of R, Python, and C/C++.

# install.packages("reticulate")
library(reticulate)
library(plotly)
# specify the path of the Python version that you want to use
#py_path = "C:/Users/Dinov/Anaconda3/"  # manual
py_path = Sys.which("python3")       # automated
# use_python(py_path, required = T)
# Sys.setenv(RETICULATE_PYTHON = "C:/Users/Dinov/Anaconda3/")
sys <- import("sys", convert = TRUE)

In this chapter, we will discuss some technical details about data formats, streaming, optimization of computation, and distributed deployment of optimized learning algorithms. Chapter 13 includes a deep dive into the mathematical and computational aspects of function optimization.

The Internet of Things (IoT) leads to a paradigm shift of scientific inference - from static data interrogated in a batch or distributed environment to an on-demand service-based Cloud computing. Here, we will demonstrate how to work with specialized datasets, data-streams, and SQL databases, as well as develop and assess on-the-fly data modeling, classification, prediction and forecasting methods. Important examples to keep in mind throughout this chapter include high-frequency data delivered real time in hospital ICU’s (e.g., microsecond Electroencephalography signals, EEGs), dynamically changing stock market data (e.g., Dow Jones Industrial Average Index, DJI), and weather patterns.

We will present (1) format conversion and working with XML, SQL, JSON, CSV, SAS, SQL, noSQL, Google BigQuery service, and other data objects, (2) visualization of bioinformatics and network data, (3) protocols for managing, classifying and predicting outcomes from data streams, (4) strategies for optimization, improvement of computational performance, parallel (MPI) and graphics (GPU) computing, (5) processing of very large datasets, and (6) electronic R-markdown notebook facilitating R integration with Python, C/C++, Java, and other languages.

1.1 Working with specialized data and databases

Unlike the case-studies we saw in the previous chapters, some real world data may not always be nicely formatted, e.g., as CSV files. We must collect, arrange, wrangle, and harmonize scattered information to generate computable data objects that can be further processed by various techniques. Data wrangling and preprocessing may take over 80% of the time researchers spend interrogating complex multi-source data archives. The following procedures will enhance your skills collecting and handling heterogeneous real world data. Multiple examples of handling long-and-wide data, messy and tidy data, and data cleaning strategies can be found in this JSS Tidy Data article by Hadley Wickham.

1.1.1 Data format conversion

The R package rio imports and exports various types of file formats, e.g., tab-separated (.tsv), comma-separated (.csv), JSON (.json), Stata (.dta), SPSS (.sav and .por), Microsoft Excel (.xls and .xlsx), Weka (.arff), and SAS (.sas7bdat and .xpt) file types.

There are three core functions in the rio package: import(), convert(), and export(). They are intuitive, easy to understand, and efficient to execute. Take Stata (.dta) files as an example. Let’s first download a dataset, 02_Nof1_Data.dta, from our data archive folder.

# install.packages("rio")
# install_formats()
library(rio)
## 
## Attaching package: 'rio'
## The following object is masked from 'package:plotly':
## 
##     export
## The following object is masked from 'package:reticulate':
## 
##     import
# Download the SAS .DTA file first locally
# https://umich.instructure.com/files/1760330/download?download_frd=1
# Local data can be loaded by
# nof1<-import("02_Nof1_Data.dta")
# the data can also be loaded from the server remotely as well:
# nof1<-import("https://umich.instructure.com/files/1760330/download?download_frd=1a") # .dta format
# nof1<-read.csv("https://umich.instructure.com/files/330385/download?download_frd=1")
nof1<-import("https://umich.instructure.com/files/1760330/download?download_frd=1")
str(nof1)
## 'data.frame':    900 obs. of  10 variables:
##  $ id       : num  1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...
##   ..- attr(*, "format.stata")= chr "%12.0g"
##  $ day      : num  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
##   ..- attr(*, "format.stata")= chr "%12.0g"
##  $ tx       : num  1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 ...
##   ..- attr(*, "format.stata")= chr "%12.0g"
##  $ selfeff  : num  33 33 33 33 33 33 33 33 33 33 ...
##   ..- attr(*, "format.stata")= chr "%12.0g"
##  $ selfeff25: num  8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 ...
##   ..- attr(*, "format.stata")= chr "%12.0g"
##  $ wpss     : num  0.97 -0.17 0.81 -0.41 0.59 -1.16 0.3 -0.34 -0.74 -0.38 ...
##   ..- attr(*, "format.stata")= chr "%12.0g"
##  $ scssuppt : num  5 3.87 4.84 3.62 4.62 2.87 4.33 3.69 3.29 3.66 ...
##   ..- attr(*, "format.stata")= chr "%12.0g"
##  $ pmss     : num  4.03 4.03 4.03 4.03 4.03 4.03 4.03 4.03 4.03 4.03 ...
##   ..- attr(*, "format.stata")= chr "%12.0g"
##  $ pmss3    : num  1.03 1.03 1.03 1.03 1.03 1.03 1.03 1.03 1.03 1.03 ...
##   ..- attr(*, "format.stata")= chr "%12.0g"
##  $ qhyact   : num  53 73 23 36 21 0 21 0 73 114 ...
##   ..- attr(*, "format.stata")= chr "%12.0g"

The data is automatically stored as a data frame. Note that by default, the package rio uses stingAsFactors=FALSE.

rio can help us export files into any other format we choose. To do this we have to use the export() function.

export(nof1, "C:/Users/IvoD/Desktop/02_Nof1.xlsx")

This line of code exports the Nof1 data in xlsx format located in the R working directory or in a user-provided directory. Mac users may have a problem exporting *.xlsx files using rio because of a lack of a zip tool, but still can output other formats such as “.csv”. An alternative strategy to save an xlsx file is to use package xlsx with default row.name=TRUE.

rio also provides a one-step process to convert-and-save data into alternative formats. The following simple code allows us to convert and save the 02_Nof1_Data.dta file we just downloaded into a CSV file.

# convert("02_Nof1_Data.dta", "02_Nof1_Data.csv")
convert("C:/Users/IvoD/Desktop/02_Nof1.xlsx", "C:/Users/IvoD/Desktop/02_Nof1_Data.csv")

You can see a new CSV file pop-up in the working directory. Similar transformations are available for other data formats and types.

1.1.2 Querying data in SQL databases

Look at the CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) Data, 2013-2015. This file (BRFSS_2013_2014_2015.zip) includes the combined landline and cell phone dataset exported from SAS V9.3 using the XPT transport format. This dataset contains \(330\) variables. The data can be imported into SPSS or STATA, however, some of the variable labels may get truncated in the process of converting to the XPT format.

Caution: The size of this compressed (ZIP) file is over \(315MB\)! Let’s start by ingesting the data for a couple of years and explore some of the information.

# install.packages("Hmisc")
library(Hmisc)

memory.size(max=T)
## [1] Inf
pathToZip <- tempfile()
getOption('timeout')  # Check default timeout: [1] 60
## [1] 60
options(timeout=600)  # extend the timeout from 1 to 10-minutes, to allow lower speed connections.
download.file("https://www.socr.umich.edu/data/DSPA/BRFSS_2013_2014_2015.zip", pathToZip)
# let's just pull two of the 3 years of data (2013 and 2015)
brfss_2013 <- sasxport.get(unzip(pathToZip)[1])
## Processing SAS dataset LLCP2013   ..
brfss_2015 <- sasxport.get(unzip(pathToZip)[3])
## Processing SAS dataset LLCP2015   ..
dim(brfss_2013); object.size(brfss_2013)
## [1] 491773    336
## 685687656 bytes
# summary(brfss_2013[1:1000, 1:10])  # subsample the data

# report the summaries for
summary(brfss_2013$has_plan)
## Length  Class   Mode 
##      0   NULL   NULL
brfss_2013$x.race <- as.factor(brfss_2013$x.race)
summary(brfss_2013$x.race)
##      1      2      3      4      5      6      7      8      9   NA's 
## 376451  39151   7683   9510   1546   2693   9130  37054   8530     25
# clean up
unlink(pathToZip)

Next, we can try to use logistic regression to find out if self-reported race/ethnicity predicts the binary outcome of having a health care plan.

brfss_2013$has_plan <- brfss_2013$hlthpln1 == 1

system.time(
  gml1 <- glm(has_plan ~ as.factor(x.race), data=brfss_2013,
              family=binomial)
)   # report execution time
##    user  system elapsed 
##    0.69    0.05    1.11
summary(gml1)
## 
## Call:
## glm(formula = has_plan ~ as.factor(x.race), family = binomial, 
##     data = brfss_2013)
## 
## Coefficients:
##                     Estimate Std. Error  z value Pr(>|z|)    
## (Intercept)         2.293549   0.005649  406.044   <2e-16 ***
## as.factor(x.race)2 -0.721676   0.014536  -49.647   <2e-16 ***
## as.factor(x.race)3 -0.511776   0.032974  -15.520   <2e-16 ***
## as.factor(x.race)4 -0.329489   0.031726  -10.386   <2e-16 ***
## as.factor(x.race)5 -1.119329   0.060153  -18.608   <2e-16 ***
## as.factor(x.race)6 -0.544458   0.054535   -9.984   <2e-16 ***
## as.factor(x.race)7 -0.510452   0.030346  -16.821   <2e-16 ***
## as.factor(x.race)8 -1.332005   0.012915 -103.138   <2e-16 ***
## as.factor(x.race)9 -0.582204   0.030604  -19.024   <2e-16 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## (Dispersion parameter for binomial family taken to be 1)
## 
##     Null deviance: 353371  on 491747  degrees of freedom
## Residual deviance: 342497  on 491739  degrees of freedom
##   (25 observations deleted due to missingness)
## AIC: 342515
## 
## Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 5

We can also examine the odds (rather the log odds ratio, LOR) of having a health care plan (HCP) by race (R). The LORs are calculated for two-dimensional arrays, separately for each race level (presence of health care plan (HCP) is binary, whereas race (R) has \(9\) levels, \(R_1, R_2, ..., R_9\)). For example, the odds ratio of having a HCP for \(R_1:R_2\) is:

\[ OR(R_1:R_2) = \frac{\frac{P \left( HCP \mid R_1 \right)}{1 - P \left( HCP \mid R_1 \right)}}{\frac{P \left( HCP \mid R_2 \right)}{1 - P \left( HCP \mid R_2 \right)}} .\]

# install.packages("vcd")
# load the vcd package to compute the LOR
library("vcd")

# Note that by default *loddsratio* computes the Log odds ratio (OR). The raw OR = exp(loddsratio)
lor_HCP_by_R <- loddsratio(has_plan ~ as.factor(x.race), data = brfss_2013)
lor_HCP_by_R
## log odds ratios for has_plan and as.factor(x.race) 
## 
##         1:2         2:3         3:4         4:5         5:6         6:7 
## -0.72167619  0.20990061  0.18228646 -0.78984000  0.57487142  0.03400611 
##         7:8         8:9 
## -0.82155382  0.74980101

Now, let’s see an example of querying a database containing structured relational records. A query is a machine instruction (typically represented as text) sent by a user to a remote database requesting a specific database operation (e.g., search or summary). One database communication protocol relies on SQL (Structured query language). MySQL is an instance of a database management system that supports SQL communication that many web applications utilize, e.g., YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, biological databases like GO, ensembl, etc. Below is an example of an SQL query using the package RMySQL. An alternative way to interface an SQL database is by using the package RODBC. Let’s look at a couple of DB query examples. The first one uses the UCSC Genomics SQL server (genome-mysql.cse.ucsc.edu) and the second one uses a local client-side database service.

# install.packages("DBI", "RMySQL")
# install.packages("RODBC"); library(RODBC)
library(DBI); library(RMySQL)
library("stringr"); library("dplyr"); library("readr")
library(magrittr)

ucscGenomeConn <- dbConnect(MySQL(),
                user='genome',
                dbname='hg19',
                host='genome-mysql.cse.ucsc.edu')
# dbGetInfo(ucscGenomeConn); dbListResults(ucscGenomeConn)

result <- dbGetQuery(ucscGenomeConn,"show databases;");

# List the DB tables
allTables <- dbListTables(ucscGenomeConn); length(allTables)
## [1] 12652
# Get dimensions of a table, read and report the head
dbListFields(ucscGenomeConn, "affyU133Plus2")
##  [1] "bin"         "matches"     "misMatches"  "repMatches"  "nCount"     
##  [6] "qNumInsert"  "qBaseInsert" "tNumInsert"  "tBaseInsert" "strand"     
## [11] "qName"       "qSize"       "qStart"      "qEnd"        "tName"      
## [16] "tSize"       "tStart"      "tEnd"        "blockCount"  "blockSizes" 
## [21] "qStarts"     "tStarts"
affyData <- dbReadTable(ucscGenomeConn, "affyU133Plus2"); head(affyData)
##   bin matches misMatches repMatches nCount qNumInsert qBaseInsert tNumInsert
## 1 585     530          4          0     23          3          41          3
## 2 585    3355         17          0    109          9          67          9
## 3 585    4156         14          0     83         16          18          2
## 4 585    4667          9          0     68         21          42          3
## 5 585    5180         14          0    167         10          38          1
## 6 585     468          5          0     14          0           0          0
##   tBaseInsert strand        qName qSize qStart qEnd tName     tSize tStart
## 1         898      -  225995_x_at   637      5  603  chr1 249250621  14361
## 2       11621      -  225035_x_at  3635      0 3548  chr1 249250621  14381
## 3          93      -  226340_x_at  4318      3 4274  chr1 249250621  14399
## 4        5743      - 1557034_s_at  4834     48 4834  chr1 249250621  14406
## 5          29      -    231811_at  5399      0 5399  chr1 249250621  19688
## 6           0      -    236841_at   487      0  487  chr1 249250621  27542
##    tEnd blockCount
## 1 15816          5
## 2 29483         17
## 3 18745         18
## 4 24893         23
## 5 25078         11
## 6 28029          1
##                                                                   blockSizes
## 1                                                          93,144,229,70,21,
## 2              73,375,71,165,303,360,198,661,201,1,260,250,74,73,98,155,163,
## 3                 690,10,32,33,376,4,5,15,5,11,7,41,277,859,141,51,443,1253,
## 4 99,352,286,24,49,14,6,5,8,149,14,44,98,12,10,355,837,59,8,1500,133,624,58,
## 5                                       131,26,1300,6,4,11,4,7,358,3359,155,
## 6                                                                       487,
##                                                                                                  qStarts
## 1                                                                                    34,132,278,541,611,
## 2                        87,165,540,647,818,1123,1484,1682,2343,2545,2546,2808,3058,3133,3206,3317,3472,
## 3                   44,735,746,779,813,1190,1195,1201,1217,1223,1235,1243,1285,1564,2423,2565,2617,3062,
## 4 0,99,452,739,764,814,829,836,842,851,1001,1016,1061,1160,1173,1184,1540,2381,2441,2450,3951,4103,4728,
## 5                                                     0,132,159,1460,1467,1472,1484,1489,1497,1856,5244,
## 6                                                                                                     0,
##                                                                                                                                      tStarts
## 1                                                                                                             14361,14454,14599,14968,15795,
## 2                                     14381,14454,14969,15075,15240,15543,15903,16104,16853,17054,17232,17492,17914,17988,18267,24736,29320,
## 3                               14399,15089,15099,15131,15164,15540,15544,15549,15564,15569,15580,15587,15628,15906,16857,16998,17049,17492,
## 4 14406,20227,20579,20865,20889,20938,20952,20958,20963,20971,21120,21134,21178,21276,21288,21298,21653,22492,22551,22559,24059,24211,24835,
## 5                                                                         19688,19819,19845,21145,21151,21155,21166,21170,21177,21535,24923,
## 6                                                                                                                                     27542,
# Select a subset, fetch the data, and report the quantiles
subsetQuery <- dbSendQuery(ucscGenomeConn, "select * from affyU133Plus2 where misMatches between 1 and 3")
affySmall <- fetch(subsetQuery); dim(affySmall)
## [1] 500  22
quantile(affySmall$misMatches)
##   0%  25%  50%  75% 100% 
##    1    1    2    2    3
dbClearResult(subsetQuery)
## [1] TRUE
# Another query
# install.packages("magrittr")
bedFile <- "C:/Users/IvoD/Desktop/repUCSC.bed"
subsetQuery1 <- dbSendQuery(ucscGenomeConn,'select genoName,genoStart,genoEnd,repName,swScore, strand,
                  repClass, repFamily from rmsk')
subsetQuery1_df <- dbFetch(subsetQuery1 , n=100) %>%
        dplyr::mutate(genoName =
                        stringr::str_replace(genoName,'chr','')) %>%
        readr::write_tsv(bedFile, col_names=T)
message('saved: ', bedFile)
dbClearResult(subsetQuery1)
## [1] TRUE
# Another DB query: Select a specific DB subset
subsetQuery2 <- dbSendQuery(ucscGenomeConn,
            "select * from affyU133Plus2 where misMatches between 1 and 4")
affyU133Plus2MisMatch <- fetch(subsetQuery2)
quantile(affyU133Plus2MisMatch$misMatches)
##   0%  25%  50%  75% 100% 
##    1    1    2    3    4
affyU133Plus2MisMatchTiny_100x22 <- fetch(subsetQuery2, n=100)
dbClearResult(subsetQuery2)
## [1] TRUE
dim(affyU133Plus2MisMatchTiny_100x22)
## [1] 100  22
summary(affyU133Plus2MisMatchTiny_100x22)
##       bin           matches       misMatches     repMatches     nCount      
##  Min.   : 13.0   Min.   : 397   Min.   :1.00   Min.   :0    Min.   :  0.00  
##  1st Qu.:834.0   1st Qu.: 960   1st Qu.:1.00   1st Qu.:0    1st Qu.:  0.00  
##  Median :844.0   Median :1732   Median :2.00   Median :0    Median :  4.00  
##  Mean   :730.9   Mean   :2249   Mean   :2.12   Mean   :0    Mean   : 14.72  
##  3rd Qu.:863.5   3rd Qu.:2832   3rd Qu.:3.00   3rd Qu.:0    3rd Qu.: 19.00  
##  Max.   :878.0   Max.   :7475   Max.   :4.00   Max.   :0    Max.   :111.00  
##    qNumInsert     qBaseInsert       tNumInsert     tBaseInsert    
##  Min.   : 0.00   Min.   :  0.00   Min.   : 0.00   Min.   :     0  
##  1st Qu.: 0.00   1st Qu.:  0.00   1st Qu.: 1.00   1st Qu.:     5  
##  Median : 1.00   Median :  1.00   Median : 3.00   Median :  4384  
##  Mean   : 2.33   Mean   :  9.39   Mean   : 5.95   Mean   : 20048  
##  3rd Qu.: 3.00   3rd Qu.:  8.00   3rd Qu.: 8.25   3rd Qu.: 26387  
##  Max.   :12.00   Max.   :197.00   Max.   :29.00   Max.   :346335  
##     strand             qName               qSize          qStart      
##  Length:100         Length:100         Min.   : 410   Min.   :  0.00  
##  Class :character   Class :character   1st Qu.: 972   1st Qu.:  0.00  
##  Mode  :character   Mode  :character   Median :1797   Median :  0.00  
##                                        Mean   :2294   Mean   :  5.46  
##                                        3rd Qu.:2840   3rd Qu.:  2.25  
##                                        Max.   :7512   Max.   :331.00  
##       qEnd         tName               tSize               tStart        
##  Min.   : 400   Length:100         Min.   :249250621   Min.   :32256024  
##  1st Qu.: 972   Class :character   1st Qu.:249250621   1st Qu.:33327868  
##  Median :1797   Mode  :character   Median :249250621   Median :35460512  
##  Mean   :2281                      Mean   :249250621   Mean   :35218635  
##  3rd Qu.:2834                      3rd Qu.:249250621   3rd Qu.:36778842  
##  Max.   :7480                      Max.   :249250621   Max.   :38510902  
##       tEnd            blockCount     blockSizes          qStarts         
##  Min.   :32256813   Min.   : 1.00   Length:100         Length:100        
##  1st Qu.:33333986   1st Qu.: 3.00   Class :character   Class :character  
##  Median :35497250   Median : 8.00   Mode  :character   Mode  :character  
##  Mean   :35240948   Mean   : 8.91                                        
##  3rd Qu.:36783220   3rd Qu.:12.25                                        
##  Max.   :38512306   Max.   :38.00                                        
##    tStarts         
##  Length:100        
##  Class :character  
##  Mode  :character  
##                    
##                    
## 
# Once done, clear and close the connections
# dbClearResult(dbListResults(ucscGenomeConn)[[1]])
dbDisconnect(ucscGenomeConn)
## [1] TRUE

Depending upon the DB server, to complete the above database SQL commands, it may require access and/or specific user credentials. The example below can be done by all users, as it relies only on local DB services.

# install.packages("RSQLite")
library("RSQLite")
## 
## Attaching package: 'RSQLite'
## The following object is masked from 'package:RMySQL':
## 
##     isIdCurrent
# generate an empty DB stored in RAM
myConnection <- dbConnect(RSQLite::SQLite(), ":memory:")
myConnection
## <SQLiteConnection>
##   Path: :memory:
##   Extensions: TRUE
dbListTables(myConnection)
## character(0)
# Add tables to the local SQL DB
data(USArrests); dbWriteTable(myConnection, "USArrests", USArrests)
dbWriteTable(myConnection, "brfss_2013", brfss_2013)
dbWriteTable(myConnection, "brfss_2015", brfss_2015)

# Check again the DB content
# allTables <- dbListTables(myConnection); length(allTables); allTables
head(dbListFields(myConnection, "brfss_2013"))
## [1] "x.state" "fmonth"  "idate"   "imonth"  "iday"    "iyear"
tail(dbListFields(myConnection, "brfss_2013"))
## [1] "rcsrace1" "rchisla1" "rcsbirth" "typeinds" "typework" "has_plan"
dbListTables(myConnection);
## [1] "USArrests"  "brfss_2013" "brfss_2015"
# Retrieve the entire DB table (for the smaller USArrests table)
head(dbGetQuery(myConnection, "SELECT * FROM USArrests"))
##   Murder Assault UrbanPop Rape
## 1   13.2     236       58 21.2
## 2   10.0     263       48 44.5
## 3    8.1     294       80 31.0
## 4    8.8     190       50 19.5
## 5    9.0     276       91 40.6
## 6    7.9     204       78 38.7
# Retrieve just the average of one feature
myQuery <- dbGetQuery(myConnection, "SELECT avg(Assault) FROM USArrests")
head(myQuery)
##   avg(Assault)
## 1       170.76
myQuery <- dbGetQuery(myConnection, "SELECT avg(Assault) FROM USArrests GROUP BY UrbanPop"); myQuery
##    avg(Assault)
## 1         48.00
## 2         81.00
## 3        152.00
## 4        211.50
## 5        271.00
## 6        190.00
## 7         83.00
## 8        109.00
## 9        109.00
## 10       120.00
## 11        57.00
## 12        56.00
## 13       236.00
## 14       188.00
## 15       186.00
## 16       102.00
## 17       156.00
## 18       113.00
## 19       122.25
## 20       229.50
## 21       151.00
## 22       231.50
## 23       172.00
## 24       145.00
## 25       255.00
## 26       120.00
## 27       110.00
## 28       204.00
## 29       237.50
## 30       252.00
## 31       147.50
## 32       149.00
## 33       254.00
## 34       174.00
## 35       159.00
## 36       276.00
# Or do it in batches (for the much larger brfss_2013 and brfss_2015 tables)
myQuery <- dbGetQuery(myConnection, "SELECT * FROM brfss_2013")

# extract data in chunks of 2 rows, note: dbGetQuery vs. dbSendQuery
# myQuery <- dbSendQuery(myConnection, "SELECT * FROM brfss_2013")
# fetch2 <- dbFetch(myQuery, n = 2); fetch2
# do we have other cases in the DB remaining?
# extract all remaining data
# fetchRemaining <- dbFetch(myQuery, n = -1);fetchRemaining
# We should have all data in DB now
# dbHasCompleted(myQuery)

# compute the average (poorhlth) grouping by Insurance (hlthpln1)
# Try some alternatives: numadult nummen numwomen genhlth physhlth menthlth poorhlth hlthpln1
myQuery1_13 <- dbGetQuery(myConnection, "SELECT avg(poorhlth) FROM brfss_2013 GROUP BY hlthpln1"); myQuery1_13
##   avg(poorhlth)
## 1      56.25466
## 2      53.99962
## 3      58.85072
## 4      66.26757
# Compare 2013 vs. 2015: Health grouping by Insurance
myQuery1_15 <- dbGetQuery(myConnection, "SELECT avg(poorhlth) FROM brfss_2015 GROUP BY hlthpln1"); myQuery1_15
##   avg(poorhlth)
## 1      55.75539
## 2      55.49487
## 3      61.35445
## 4      67.62125
myQuery1_13 - myQuery1_15
##   avg(poorhlth)
## 1     0.4992652
## 2    -1.4952515
## 3    -2.5037326
## 4    -1.3536797
# reset the DB query
# dbClearResult(myQuery)

# clean up
dbDisconnect(myConnection)

1.1.3 SparQL Queries

The SparQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SparQL) is a semantic database query language for RDF (Resource Description Framework) data objects. SparQL queries consist of (1) triple patterns, (2) conjunctions, and (3) disjunctions.

The following example uses SparQL to query the prevalence of tuberculosis from the WikiData SparQL server and plot it on a World geographic map.

# install.packages("SPARQL"); install.packages("rworldmap"); install.packages("spam")
library(SPARQL)
library(ggplot2)
library(rworldmap)
library(plotly)

# SparQL Format
# https://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/0615-qbe/

# W3C Turtle - Terse RDF Triple Language:
# https://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/turtle/#sec-examples

# RDF (Resource Description Framework) is a graphical data model of (subject, predicate, object) triples representing:
# "subject-node to predicate arc to object arc"
# Resources are represented with URIs, which can be abbreviated as prefixed names
# Objects are literals: strings, integers, booleans, etc.
# Syntax
#    URIs: <http://example.com/resource> or prefix:name
#    Literals:
#             "plain string" "13.4""
#             xsd:float, or
#             "string with language" @en
#    Triple: pref:subject other:predicate "object".

wdqs <- "https://query.wikidata.org/bigdata/namespace/wdq/sparql"
query = "PREFIX wd: <http://www.wikidata.org/entity/>
    # prefix declarations
    PREFIX wdt: <http://www.wikidata.org/prop/direct/>
    PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
    PREFIX p: <http://www.wikidata.org/prop/>
    PREFIX v: <http://www.wikidata.org/prop/statement/>
    PREFIX qualifier: <http://www.wikidata.org/prop/qualifier/>
    PREFIX statement: <http://www.wikidata.org/prop/statement/>

    # result clause
    SELECT DISTINCT ?countryLabel ?ISO3Code ?latlon ?prevalence ?doid ?year

    # query pattern against RDF data
    # Q36956 Hansen's disease, Leprosy https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q36956
    # Q15750965 - Alzheimer's disease: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15750965
    # Influenza - Q2840: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2840
    # Q12204 - tuberculosis  https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q12204
    # P699 Alzheimer's Disease ontology ID
    # P1193 prevalence: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1193
    # P17 country: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P17
    # Country ISO-3 code: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P298
    # Location: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P625

    # Wikidata docs: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_query_service/User_Manual

    WHERE {
      wd:Q12204 wdt:P699 ?doid ; # tuberculosis P699 Disease ontology ID
      p:P1193 ?prevalencewithProvenance .
      ?prevalencewithProvenance qualifier:P17 ?country ;
      qualifier:P585 ?year ;
      statement:P1193 ?prevalence .
      ?country wdt:P625 ?latlon ;
      rdfs:label ?countryLabel ;
      wdt:P298 ?ISO3Code ;
      wdt:P297 ?ISOCode .
    FILTER (lang(?countryLabel) = \"en\")
    # FILTER constraints use boolean conditions to filter out unwanted query results.
    #    Shortcut: a semicolon (;) can be used to separate two triple patterns that share the same disease (?country is the shared subject above.)
    #     rdfs:label is a common predicate for giving a human-friendly label to a resource.

    }
    # query modifiers
    ORDER BY DESC(?population)
"

# install.packages("WikidataQueryServiceR")
library(WikidataQueryServiceR)
library(mapproj)

results <- query_wikidata(sparql_query=query); head(results)
## # A tibble: 6 × 6
##   countryLabel             ISO3Code latlon  prevalence doid  year               
##   <chr>                    <chr>    <chr>        <dbl> <chr> <dttm>             
## 1 Norway                   NOR      Point(…  0.0001    DOID… 2014-01-01 00:00:00
## 2 United States of America USA      Point(…  0.000029  DOID… 2014-01-01 00:00:00
## 3 France                   FRA      Point(…  0.0000012 DOID… 2014-01-01 00:00:00
## 4 Iceland                  ISL      Point(…  0.0000043 DOID… 2014-01-01 00:00:00
## 5 Suriname                 SUR      Point(…  0.00044   DOID… 2014-01-01 00:00:00
## 6 Ecuador                  ECU      Point(…  0.00078   DOID… 2014-01-01 00:00:00
# OLD: results <- SPARQL(url=wdqs, query=query); head(results)
# resultMatrix <- as.matrix(results$results)
# View(resultMatrix)
# sPDF <- joinCountryData2Map(results$results, joinCode = "ISO3", nameJoinColumn = "ISO3Code")

# join the data to the geo map
sPDF <- joinCountryData2Map(results, joinCode = "ISO3", nameJoinColumn = "ISO3Code")
## 6 codes from your data successfully matched countries in the map
## 0 codes from your data failed to match with a country code in the map
## 237 codes from the map weren't represented in your data
#map the data with no legend
mapParams <- mapCountryData( sPDF
              , nameColumnToPlot="prevalence"
              # Alternatively , nameColumnToPlot="doid"
              , addLegend='FALSE',
              mapTitle="Prevalence of Tuberculosis Worldwide"
              )

#add a modified legend using the same initial parameters as mapCountryData
do.call( addMapLegend, c( mapParams
                        , legendLabels="all"
                        , legendWidth=0.5
                        ))
text(1, -120, "Partial view of Tuberculosis Prevalence in the World", cex=1)

#do.call( addMapLegendBoxes
#        , c(mapParams
#        , list(
#          legendText=c('Chile', 'US','Brazil','Argentina'),
#          x='bottom',title="AD Prevalence",horiz=TRUE)))

# Alternatively: mapCountryData(sPDF, nameColumnToPlot="prevalence",  oceanCol="darkblue", missingCountryCol="white")

View(getMap())
# write.csv(file = "C:/Users/Map.csv", getMap())

# Alternative Plot_ly Geo-map
df_cities <- results
df_cities$popm <- paste(df_cities$countryLabel, df_cities$ISO3Code, "prevalence=", df_cities$prevalence)
df_cities$quart <- with(df_cities, cut(prevalence, quantile(prevalence), include.lowest = T))
levels(df_cities$quart) <- paste(c("1st", "2nd", "3rd", "4th"), "Quantile")
df_cities$quart <- as.ordered(df_cities$quart)

df_cities <- tidyr::separate(df_cities, latlon, into = c("long", "lat"), sep = " ")
df_cities$long <- gsub("Point\\(", "", df_cities$long)
df_cities$lat <- gsub("\\)", "", df_cities$lat)
head(df_cities)
## # A tibble: 6 × 9
##   countryLabel   ISO3Code long  lat   prevalence doid  year                popm 
##   <chr>          <chr>    <chr> <chr>      <dbl> <chr> <dttm>              <chr>
## 1 Norway         NOR      11.0  65.0   0.0001    DOID… 2014-01-01 00:00:00 Norw…
## 2 United States… USA      -98.… 39.8…  0.000029  DOID… 2014-01-01 00:00:00 Unit…
## 3 France         FRA      2.0   47.0   0.0000012 DOID… 2014-01-01 00:00:00 Fran…
## 4 Iceland        ISL      -19.0 65.0   0.0000043 DOID… 2014-01-01 00:00:00 Icel…
## 5 Suriname       SUR      -56.0 4.0    0.00044   DOID… 2014-01-01 00:00:00 Suri…
## 6 Ecuador        ECU      -78.0 -1.0   0.00078   DOID… 2014-01-01 00:00:00 Ecua…
## # ℹ 1 more variable: quart <ord>
ge <- list(scope = 'world', showland = TRUE, landcolor = toRGB("lightgray"),
           subunitwidth = 1, countrywidth = 1, subunitcolor = toRGB("white"), countrycolor = toRGB("white"))

plot_geo(df_cities, lon = ~long, lat = ~lat, text = ~popm, mode="markers",
         marker = ~list(size = 20, line = list(width = 0.1)),
         color = ~quart, locationmode = 'country names') %>%
    layout(geo = ge, title = 'Prevalence of Tuberculosis Worldwide')

Similar geographic maps may be displayed fo other processes, e.g., malaria. Note that such data are sparse as they are pulled dynamically from wikidata.

Below is an example of a geo-map showing the global locations and population-size of various cities in millions.

library(plotly)

df_cities <- world.cities
df_cities$popm <- paste(df_cities$country.etc, df_cities$name, "Pop", round(df_cities$pop/1e6,2), " million")
df_cities$quart <- with(df_cities, cut(pop, quantile(pop), include.lowest = T))
levels(df_cities$quart) <- paste(c("1st", "2nd", "3rd", "4th"), "Quantile")
df_cities$quart <- as.ordered(df_cities$quart)

ge <- list(scope = 'world', showland = TRUE, landcolor = toRGB("lightgray"),
           subunitwidth = 1, countrywidth = 1, subunitcolor = toRGB("white"), countrycolor = toRGB("white"))

plot_geo(df_cities, lon = ~long, lat = ~lat, text = ~popm, mode="markers",
         marker = ~list(size = sqrt(pop/10000) + 1, line = list(width = 0.1)),
         color = ~quart, locationmode = 'country names') %>%
    layout(geo = ge, title = 'City Populations (Worldwide)')

1.1.4 Real Random Number Generation

We are already familiar with (pseudo) random number generation (e.g., rnorm(100, 10, 4) or runif(100, 10,20)), which algorithmically generate random values subject to specified distributions. There are also web-services, e.g., random.org, that can provide true random numbers based on atmospheric noise, rather than using a pseudo random number generation protocol. Below is one example of generating a total of 300 numbers arranged in 3 columns, each of 100 rows of random integers (in decimal format in the range \([100, 200]\).

siteURL <- "https://random.org/integers/"  #   base URL
shortQuery<-"num=300&min=100&max=200&col=3&base=10&format=plain&rnd=new"
completeQuery <- paste(siteURL, shortQuery, sep="?")  # concat url and submit query string
rngNumbers <- read.table(file=completeQuery)        # and read the data
head(rngNumbers); tail(rngNumbers)
##    V1  V2  V3
## 1 193 112 161
## 2 108 170 138
## 3 112 191 192
## 4 186 160 189
## 5 121 130 181
## 6 115 163 185
##      V1  V2  V3
## 95  164 129 124
## 96  190 162 132
## 97  181 193 150
## 98  187 197 163
## 99  168 182 143
## 100 124 114 119

1.1.5 Downloading the complete text of web pages

The package RCurl provides an amazing tool for extracting and scraping information from websites. Let’s use it to demonstrate extracting information from a SOCR website.

# install.packages("RCurl")
library(RCurl)
web <- getURL("https://wiki.socr.umich.edu/index.php/SOCR_Data", followlocation = TRUE)
str(web, nchar.max = 200)
##  chr "<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html class=\"client-nojs\" lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">\n<head>\n<meta charset=\"UTF-8\"/>\n<title>SOCR Data - SOCR</title>\n<script>document.documentElement.className ="| __truncated__

The web object looks incomprehensible. This is because most websites are wrapped in XML/HTML hypertext or include JSON formatted meta-data. RCurl deals with special HTML tags and website meta-data.

To deal with the web pages only, httr package would be a better choice than RCurl. It returns a list that makes much more sense.

# install.packages("httr")
library(httr)
web<-GET("https://wiki.socr.umich.edu/index.php/SOCR_Data")
str(web[1:3])
## List of 3
##  $ url        : chr "https://wiki.socr.umich.edu/index.php/SOCR_Data"
##  $ status_code: int 200
##  $ headers    :List of 15
##   ..$ date                  : chr "Sun, 21 Apr 2024 01:26:39 GMT"
##   ..$ server                : chr "Apache"
##   ..$ x-powered-by          : chr "PHP/7.3.11"
##   ..$ x-content-type-options: chr "nosniff"
##   ..$ content-language      : chr "en"
##   ..$ x-ua-compatible       : chr "IE=Edge"
##   ..$ link                  : chr "</local/images/SOCR_3D_Logo_UM.png?55fd6>;rel=preload;as=image"
##   ..$ vary                  : chr "Accept-Encoding,Cookie"
##   ..$ expires               : chr "Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT"
##   ..$ cache-control         : chr "private, must-revalidate, max-age=0"
##   ..$ last-modified         : chr "Sat, 21 Oct 2023 19:02:36 GMT"
##   ..$ content-encoding      : chr "gzip"
##   ..$ transfer-encoding     : chr "chunked"
##   ..$ content-type          : chr "text/html; charset=UTF-8"
##   ..$ set-cookie            : chr "LBSESSIONID=1392759693.47873.0000; path=/; Httponly; Secure; SameSite=none"
##   ..- attr(*, "class")= chr [1:2] "insensitive" "list"

1.1.6 Reading and writing XML with the XML package

A combination of the RCurl and the XML packages could help us extract only the plain text in our desired webpages. This would be very helpful to get information from heavy text based websites.

web<-getURL("https://wiki.socr.umich.edu/index.php/SOCR_Data", followlocation = TRUE)
#install.packages("XML")
library(XML)
web.parsed<-htmlParse(web, asText = T, encoding="UTF-8")
plain.text<-xpathSApply(web.parsed, "//p", xmlValue)
substr(paste(plain.text, collapse = "\n"), start=1, stop=256)
## [1] "The links below contain a number of datasets that may be used for demonstration purposes in probability and statistics education. There are two types of data - simulated (computer-generated using random sampling) and observed (research, observationally or "

Here we extracted all plain text between the starting and ending paragraph HTML tags, <p> and </p>.

More information about extracting text from XML/HTML to text via XPath is available here.

1.1.7 Web-page Data Scraping

The process of extracting data from complete web pages and storing it in structured data format is called scraping. However, before starting a data scrape from a website, we need to understand the underlying HTML structure for that specific website. Also, we have to check the terms of that website to make sure that scraping from this site is allowed.

The R package rvest is a very good place to start “harvesting” data from websites.

To start with, we use read_html() to ingest the SOCR website hypertext metadata into a xmlnode object.

library(rvest)
# SOCR<-read_html("http://wiki.stat.ucla.edu/socr/index.php/SOCR_Data")
SOCR<-read_html("https://wiki.socr.umich.edu/index.php/SOCR_Data")
SOCR
## {html_document}
## <html class="client-nojs" lang="en" dir="ltr">
## [1] <head>\n<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8 ...
## [2] <body class="mediawiki ltr sitedir-ltr mw-hide-empty-elt ns-0 ns-subject  ...

From the summary structure of SOCR, we can discover that there are two important hypertext section markups <head> and <body>. Also, notice that the SOCR data website uses <title> and </title> tags to extract the title in the <head> section. Let’s use html_node() to extract title information based on this knowledge.

SOCR %>% html_node("head title") %>% html_text()
## [1] "SOCR Data - SOCR"

Here we used %>% operator, or pipe, to connect two functions, see magrittr package. The above line of code creates a chain of functions to operate on the SOCR object. The first function in the chain html_node() extracts the title from the head section. Then, html_text() translates HTML formatted hypertext into English. More on R piping can be found in the magrittr package.

Another function, rvest::html_nodes() can be very helpful in scraping. Similar to html_node(), html_nodes() can help us extract multiple nodes in an xmlnode object. Assume that we want to obtain the meta elements (usually page description, keywords, author of the document, last modified, and other metadata) from the SOCR data website. We apply html_nodes() to the SOCR object for lines starting with <meta in the <head> section. It is optional to use html_attrs()(extracts attributes, text and tag name from html) to make texts prettier.

meta <- SOCR %>% html_nodes("head meta") %>% html_attrs()
meta
## [[1]]
##                 http-equiv                    content 
##             "Content-Type" "text/html; charset=UTF-8" 
## 
## [[2]]
## charset 
## "UTF-8" 
## 
## [[3]]
##                          name                       content 
## "ResourceLoaderDynamicStyles"                            "" 
## 
## [[4]]
##               name            content 
##        "generator" "MediaWiki 1.31.6"

1.1.8 Parsing JSON from web APIs

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allow web-accessible functions to communicate with each other. Today most API is stored in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format.

JSON represents a plain text format used for web applications, data structures or objects. Online JSON objects could be retrieved by packages like RCurl and httr. Let’s see a JSON formatted dataset first. We can use 02_Nof1_Data.json in the class file as an example.

library(httr)
nof1 <- GET("https://umich.instructure.com/files/1760327/download?download_frd=1")
nof1
## Response [https://cdn.inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net/0accb6e0-67aa-4ff4-a5a2-24b3c7606698/02_Nof1_Data.json?token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzUxMiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCIsImtpZCI6ImNkbiJ9.eyJyZXNvdXJjZSI6Ii8wYWNjYjZlMC02N2FhLTRmZjQtYTVhMi0yNGIzYzc2MDY2OTgvMDJfTm9mMV9EYXRhLmpzb24iLCJ0ZW5hbnQiOiJjYW52YXMiLCJ1c2VyX2lkIjpudWxsLCJpYXQiOjE3MTM2MjU2MDgsImV4cCI6MTcxMzcxMjAwOH0.lzXBORw6dFqeyJF7hihSU6llHNzioAF2eKFsLdnpILe2HsxBaCHKWlmHG7XPl1U-YaJqqactlcT8onvUYE1hxA&download=1&content_type=application%2Fjson]
##   Date: 2024-04-21 01:16
##   Status: 200
##   Content-Type: application/json
##   Size: 109 kB
## [{"ID":1,"Day":1,"Tx":1,"SelfEff":33,"SelfEff25":8,"WPSS":0.97,"SocSuppt":5.0...
## {"ID":1,"Day":2,"Tx":1,"SelfEff":33,"SelfEff25":8,"WPSS":-0.17,"SocSuppt":3.8...
## {"ID":1,"Day":3,"Tx":0,"SelfEff":33,"SelfEff25":8,"WPSS":0.81,"SocSuppt":4.84...
## {"ID":1,"Day":4,"Tx":0,"SelfEff":33,"SelfEff25":8,"WPSS":-0.41,"SocSuppt":3.6...
## {"ID":1,"Day":5,"Tx":1,"SelfEff":33,"SelfEff25":8,"WPSS":0.59,"SocSuppt":4.62...
## {"ID":1,"Day":6,"Tx":1,"SelfEff":33,"SelfEff25":8,"WPSS":-1.16,"SocSuppt":2.8...
## {"ID":1,"Day":7,"Tx":0,"SelfEff":33,"SelfEff25":8,"WPSS":0.30,"SocSuppt":4.33...
## {"ID":1,"Day":8,"Tx":0,"SelfEff":33,"SelfEff25":8,"WPSS":-0.34,"SocSuppt":3.6...
## {"ID":1,"Day":9,"Tx":1,"SelfEff":33,"SelfEff25":8,"WPSS":-0.74,"SocSuppt":3.2...
## {"ID":1,"Day":10,"Tx":1,"SelfEff":33,"SelfEff25":8,"WPSS":-0.38,"SocSuppt":3....
## ...

We can see that JSON objects are very simple. The data structure is organized using hierarchies marked by square brackets. Each piece of information is formatted as a {key:value} pair.

The package jsonlite is a very useful tool to import online JSON formatted datasets into data frames directly. Its syntax is very straight forward.

# install.packages("jsonlite")
library(jsonlite)
nof1_lite <- fromJSON("https://umich.instructure.com/files/1760327/download?download_frd=1")
class(nof1_lite)
## [1] "data.frame"

1.1.9 Reading and writing Microsoft Excel spreadsheets using XLSX

We can transfer a xlsx dataset into CSV and use read.csv() to load this kind of dataset. However, R provides an alternative read.xlsx() function in package xlsx to simplify this process. Take our 02_Nof1_Data.xls data in the class file as an example. We need to download the file first.

# install.packages("xlsx")
library(xlsx)
nof1 <- read.xlsx("C:/Users/IvoD/Desktop/02_Nof1.xlsx", 1)
str(nof1)
## 'data.frame':    900 obs. of  10 variables:
##  $ id       : num  1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...
##  $ day      : num  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
##  $ tx       : num  1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 ...
##  $ selfeff  : num  33 33 33 33 33 33 33 33 33 33 ...
##  $ selfeff25: num  8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 ...
##  $ wpss     : num  0.97 -0.17 0.81 -0.41 0.59 -1.16 0.3 -0.34 -0.74 -0.38 ...
##  $ scssuppt : num  5 3.87 4.84 3.62 4.62 2.87 4.33 3.69 3.29 3.66 ...
##  $ pmss     : num  4.03 4.03 4.03 4.03 4.03 4.03 4.03 4.03 4.03 4.03 ...
##  $ pmss3    : num  1.03 1.03 1.03 1.03 1.03 1.03 1.03 1.03 1.03 1.03 ...
##  $ qhyact   : num  53 73 23 36 21 0 21 0 73 114 ...

The last argument, 1, stands for the first excel sheet, as any excel file may include a large number of tables in it. Also, we can download the xls or xlsx file into our R working directory so that it is easier to find file paths.

Sometimes more complex protocols may be necessary to ingest data from XLSX documents. For instance, if the XLSX doc is large, includes many tables and is only accessible via HTTP protocol from a web-server. Below is an example downloading the second table, ABIDE_Aggregated_Data, from the multi-table Autism/ABIDE XLSX dataset:

# install.packages("openxlsx"); library(openxlsx)
tmp = tempfile(fileext = ".xlsx")
download.file(url = "https://umich.instructure.com/files/3225493/download?download_frd=1", destfile = tmp, mode="wb")
df_Autism <- openxlsx::read.xlsx(xlsxFile = tmp, sheet = "ABIDE_Aggregated_Data", skipEmptyRows = TRUE)
dim(df_Autism)
## [1] 1098 2145

1.2 Working with domain-specific data

Many powerful Machine Learning methods are applicable in a broad range of disciplines. However, each domain has specific requirements and specialized data formats that often demand customized interfaces to employ existing tools to research-specific data-driven challenges. The important field of biomedical informatics and data science (BIDS) represents one such example.

1.2.1 Working with bioinformatics data

Genetic data are stored in widely varying formats and usually have more feature variables than observations. They could have 1,000 columns and only 200 rows. One of the commonly used pre-processing steps for such datasets is variable selection. We will talk about this in Chapter 11.

The Bioconductor project created powerful R functionality (packages and tools) for analyzing genomic data, see Bioconductor for more detailed information.

1.2.2 Visualizing network data

Social network data and graph datasets describe the relations between nodes (vertices) using connections (links or edges) joining the node objects. Assume we have N objects, we can have \(N\times (N-1)\) directed links establishing paired associations between the nodes. Let’s use an example with N=4 to demonstrate a simple graph potentially modeling the following linkage table.

objects 1 2 3 4
1 ….. \(1\rightarrow 2\) \(1\rightarrow 3\) \(1\rightarrow 4\)
2 \(2\rightarrow 1\) ….. \(2\rightarrow 3\) \(2\rightarrow 4\)
3 \(3\rightarrow 1\) \(3\rightarrow 2\) ….. \(3\rightarrow 4\)
4 \(4\rightarrow 1\) \(4\rightarrow 2\) \(4\rightarrow 3\) …..

If we change the \(a\rightarrow b\) to an indicator variable (0 or 1) capturing whether we have an edge connecting a pair of nodes, then we get the graph adjacency matrix.

Edge lists provide an alternative way to represent network connections. Every line in the list contains a connection between two nodes (objects).

Vertex Vertex
1 2
1 3
2 3

The above edge list is listing three network connections: object 1 is linked to object 2; object 1 is linked to object 3; and object 2 is linked to object 3. Note that edge lists can represent both directed as well as undirected networks or graphs.

We can imagine that if N is very large, e.g., social networks, the data representation and analysis may be resource intense (memory or computation). In R, we have multiple packages that can deal with social network data. One user-friendly example is provided using the igraph package. First, let’s build a toy example and visualize it using this package.

#install.packages("igraph")
library(igraph)
g<-graph(c(1, 2, 1, 3, 2, 3, 3, 4), n=10)
plot(g)

Here c(1, 2, 1, 3, 2, 3, 3, 4) is an edge list with 4 pairs of node connections and n=10 means we have 10 nodes (objects) in total. The small arrows in the graph show us directed network connections. We might notice that 5-10 nodes are scattered out in the graph. This is because they are not included in the edge list, so there are no network connections between them and the rest of the network.

Now let’s examine the co-appearance network of Facebook circles. The data contains anonymized circles (friends lists) from Facebook collected from survey participants using a Facebook app. The dataset only includes edges (circles, 88,234) connecting pairs of nodes (users 4,039) in the ego networks.

The values on the connections represent the number of links/edges within a circle. We have a huge edge-list made of scrambled Facebook user IDs. Let’s load this dataset into R first. The data is stored in a text file. Unlike CSV files, text files in table format need to be imported using read.table(). We are using the header=F option to let R know that we don’t have a header in the text file that contains only tab-separated node pairs (indicating the social connections, edges, between Facebook users).

soc.net.data<-read.table("https://umich.instructure.com/files/2854431/download?download_frd=1", sep=" ", header=F)
head(soc.net.data)
##   V1 V2
## 1  0  1
## 2  0  2
## 3  0  3
## 4  0  4
## 5  0  5
## 6  0  6

Now the data is stored in a data frame. To make this dataset ready for igraph processing and visualization, we need to convert soc.net.data into a matrix object.

soc.net.data.mat <- as.matrix(soc.net.data, ncol=2)

By using ncol=2, we made a matrix with two columns. The data is now ready and we can apply graph.edgelist().

# remove the first 347 edges (to wipe out the degenerate "0" node)
graph_m <- graph.edgelist(soc.net.data.mat[-c(0:347), ], directed = F)
## Warning: `graph.edgelist()` was deprecated in igraph 2.0.0.
## ℹ Please use `graph_from_edgelist()` instead.
## This warning is displayed once every 8 hours.
## Call `lifecycle::last_lifecycle_warnings()` to see where this warning was
## generated.

Before we display the social network graph we may want to examine our model first.

summary(graph_m)
## IGRAPH 3ab72f3 U--- 4038 87887 --

This is an extremely brief yet informative summary. The first line U--- 4038 87887 includes potentially four letters and two numbers. The first letter could be U or D indicating undirected or directed edges. The second letter N would mean that the object set has a “name” attribute. And the third letter is for the weighted (W) graph. Since we didn’t add weight in our analysis the third letter is empty (“-”). A fourth character is an indicator for bipartite graphs (whose vertices can be divided into two disjoint sets and (that is, represent independent sets where each vertex from one set connects to one vertex in the other set). The two numbers following the 4 letters represent the number of nodes and the number of edges, respectively. Now let’s render the graph.

# Choose an algorithm to find network communities.
# FastGreedy algorithm is great for large undirected networks
comm_graph_m <- fastgreedy.community(graph_m)
## Warning: `fastgreedy.community()` was deprecated in igraph 2.0.0.
## ℹ Please use `cluster_fast_greedy()` instead.
## This warning is displayed once every 8 hours.
## Call `lifecycle::last_lifecycle_warnings()` to see where this warning was
## generated.
# sizes(comm_graph_m); membership(comm_graph_m)

# Collapse the graph by communities
reduced_comm_graph_m <- simplify(contract(graph_m, membership(comm_graph_m)))

# Plot simplified graph
# plot(reduced_comm_graph_m, vertex.color = adjustcolor("SkyBlue2", alpha.f = .5), vertex.label.color = adjustcolor("black", 0.9), margin=-0.2)
# plot(graph_m, vertex.color = adjustcolor("SkyBlue2", alpha.f = .5), vertex.label.color = adjustcolor("black", 0.9), margin=-0.2)
# plot(graph_m, margin=-0.2, vertex.shape="none", vertex.size=0.01)
plot(graph_m, vertex.size=3, vertex.color=adjustcolor("SkyBlue2", alpha.f = 0.7), vertex.label=NA, margin=-0.2, layout=layout.reingold.tilford)

# simplify graph
# simple_graph_m <- simplify(graph_m, remove.loops=T, remove.multiple=T)
# simple_graph_m <- delete.vertices(simple_graph_m, which(degree(simple_graph_m)<100))
# plot(simple_graph_m, vertex.size=3, vertex.color=adjustcolor("SkyBlue2", alpha.f = .7), vertex.label=NA, margin=-0.6, layout=layout.reingold.tilford(simple_graph_m, circular=T))

# Louvain Clustering of the graph nodes
community <- cluster_louvain(graph_m)
plot(community, graph_m, vertex.label.cex = .5, main = "Community Structure")

We can also use D3 to display a dynamic graph.

# install.packages('networkD3')
library(networkD3)
df <- as_data_frame(graph_m, what = "edges")
# Javascript note indexing starts at zero, not 1, make an artificial index zero root
df1 <- rbind(c(0,1), df)

# Use D3 to display graph
simpleNetwork(df1[1:1000,],fontSize = 12, zoom = T)

This graph is very complicated, yet we can still see that some nodes (influencers) are surrounded by more nodes than other network members. To obtain such information we can use the degree() function which lists the number of edges for each node.

degree(graph_m)[100:110]
##  [1]    8   18    5   15   31   13    7 1044   12   36    4

Skimming the table we can find that the 107-th user has as many as \(1,044\) connections, which makes the user a highly-connected hub. Likely, this node may have higher social relevance.

Similarly, some edges might be more important than other edges because they serve as a bridge between different cloud or clusters of nodes. To compare their importance, we can use the betweenness centrality measurement. Betweenness centrality measures centrality in a network. High centrality for a specific node indicates influence. betweenness() can help us to calculate the betweenness centrality of a given fixed network node \(v_o\)

\[g(v_0)=\sum_{s\neq v_o\neq t}{\frac{\sigma_{st}(v_o)}{\sigma_{st}}},\]

where \({\sigma_{st}}\) is the total number of shortest paths from node \(s\) to node \(t\) and \(\sigma_{st}(v_o)\) is the number of those paths that pass through the fixed network node \(v_o\), which is not a leaf node on the graph.

betweenness(graph_m)[100:110]

Again, the 107-th node has the highest betweenness centrality (\(3.556221e+06\)).

We can try another example using SOCR hierarchical data, which is also available for dynamic exploration as a tree graph. Let’s read its JSON data source using the jsonlite package.

tree.json <- fromJSON("http://socr.ucla.edu/SOCR_HyperTree.json", simplifyDataFrame = FALSE)
# tree.json<-fromJSON("https://socr.umich.edu/html/navigators/D3/xml/SOCR_HyperTree.json", simplifyDataFrame = FALSE)
# tree.json<-fromJSON("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SOCR/Navigator/master/data/SOCR_HyperTree.json", simplifyDataFrame = FALSE)

This generates a list object representing the hierarchical structure of the network. Note that this is quite different from edge list. There is one root node, its sub nodes are called children nodes, and the terminal notes are call leaf nodes. Instead of presenting the relationship between nodes in pairs, this hierarchical structure captures the level for each node. To draw the social network graph, we need to convert it as a Node object. We can utilize the as.Node() function in the data.tree package to do so.

# install.packages("data.tree")
library(data.tree)
tree.graph<-as.Node(tree.json, mode = "explicit")

Here we use the mode="explicit" option to allow “children” nodes to have their own “children” nodes. Now, the tree.json object has been separated into four different node structures - "About SOCR", "SOCR Resources", "Get Started", and "SOCR Wiki". Let’s plot the first one using the igraph package.

In the example below, we are demonstrating a slightly complicated scenario where the graphs source data (in this case JSON file) includes nodes with the same name. In principle, this causes a problem with the graph traversal that may lead to infinite loops of node traversal. Thus, we will search for nodes with duplicated names and modify their names to make the algorithm more robust.

AreNamesUnique <- function(node) {
  mynames <- node$Get("name")
  all(duplicated(mynames) == FALSE)
}

# AreNamesUnique(tree.graph$`About SOCR`)

# Find Duplicate Node names: duplicated(tree.graph$`About SOCR`$Get("name"))
# duplicated(tree.graph$Get("name"))

# One branch of the SOCR Tree: About SOCR
# getUniqueNodes(tree.graph$`About SOCR`)
# AreNamesUnique(tree.graph$`About SOCR`)

## extract Graph Nodes with Unique Names (remove duplicate nodes)
getUniqueNodes <- function(node) {
  AreNamesUnique(node)
  mynames <- node$Get("name")
  (names_unique <- ifelse (duplicated(mynames),
                           sprintf("%s_%d", mynames, sample(1:1000,1)), mynames))
  node$Set(name = names_unique)
  AreNamesUnique(node)
  return(node)
}

# Do this duplicate node renaming until there are no duplicated names
while (length(tree.graph$Get("name")) != length(unique(tree.graph$Get("name")))) {
  getUniqueNodes(tree.graph)
  AreNamesUnique(tree.graph)
}

length(tree.graph$Get("name"))
## [1] 587
length(unique(tree.graph$Get("name")))
## [1] 587
plot(as.igraph(tree.graph$`About SOCR`), edge.arrow.size=5, edge.label.font=0.05)

## D3 plot
df <- as_data_frame(as.igraph(tree.graph$`About SOCR`), what = "edges")
# Javascript note indexing starts at zero, not 1, make an artificial index zero root
df1 <- rbind(c("SOCR", "About SOCR"), df)

# Use D3 to display graph
simpleNetwork(df1, fontSize = 12, zoom = T)
# Louvain Clustering of the graph nodes
graph_m <- as.igraph(tree.graph$`About SOCR`)
community <- cluster_louvain(graph_m)
plot(community, graph_m, vertex.label.cex = .5, main = "SOCR Resource HTML Structure")

In this graph, the node "About SOCR", located at the center of the graph, represents the root of the tree network. Of course, we can repeat this process starting with the root of the complete hierarchical structure, SOCR.

1.3 Data Streaming

The proliferation of Cloud services and the emergence of modern technology in all aspects of human experiences leads to a tsunami of data, much of which is steamed real-time. The interrogation of such voluminous data is an increasingly important area of research. Data streams are ordered, often unbounded, sequences of data points created continuously by a data generator. All the data mining, interrogation and forecasting methods we discussed for traditional datasets are also applicable to data streams.

1.3.1 Definition

Mathematically, a data stream in an ordered sequence of data points: \[Y = \{y_1, y_2, y_3, \cdots, y_t, \cdots \},\] where the (time) index, \(t\), reflects the order of the observation/record, which may be single numbers, simple vectors in multidimensional space, or objects, e.g., structured Ann Arbor Weather (JSON) and its corresponding structured form. Some streaming data is streamed because it’s too large to be downloaded shotgun style and some is streamed because it’s continually generated and serviced. This presents the potential problem of dealing with data streams that may be unlimited.

Notes:

  • Data sources: Real or synthetic stream data can be used. Random simulation streams may be created by rstream. Real stream data may be piped from financial data providers, the WHO, World Bank, NCAR and other sources.
  • Inference Techniques: Many of the data interrogation techniques we have seen can be employed for dynamic stream data, e.g., factas, for PCA, rEMM and birch for clustering, etc. Clustering and classification methods capable of processing data streams have been developed, e.g., Very Fast Decision Trees (VFDT), time window-based Online Information Network (OLIN), On-demand Classification, and the APRIORI streaming algorithm.
  • Cloud distributed computing: Hadoop2/HadoopStreaming, SPARK, Storm3/RStorm and other services provide environments to expand batch/script-based R tools to the Cloud.

1.3.2 The stream package

The R stream package provides data stream mining algorithms using fpc, clue, cluster, clusterGeneration, MASS, and proxy packages. In addition, the package streamMOA provides an rJava interface to the Java-based data stream clustering algorithms available in the Massive Online Analysis (MOA) framework for stream classification, regression and clustering.

If you need a deeper exposure to data streaming in R, we recommend you go over the stream vignettes.

1.3.3 Synthetic example - random Gaussian stream

This example shows the creation and loading of a mixture of 5 random 2D Gaussians, centers at (x_coords, y_coords) with paired correlations rho_corr, representing a simulated data stream.

1.3.4 Generate the stream

# install.packages("stream")
library("stream")
x_coords <- c(0.2,0.3, 0.5, 0.8, 0.9)
y_coords <- c(0.8,0.3, 0.7, 0.1, 0.5)
p_weight <- c(0.1, 0.9, 0.5, 0.4, 0.3) # A vector of probabilities that determines the likelihood of generated a data point from a particular cluster
set.seed(12345)
stream_5G <- DSD_Gaussians(k = 5, d = 2, mu=cbind(x_coords, y_coords), p=p_weight)

1.3.4.1 K-Means clustering

We will now try k-means (Chapter 8) and a density-based data stream clustering algorithm, D-Stream, where micro-clusters are formed by grid cells of size gridsize with the density of a grid cell (Cm) being at least 1.2 times the average cell density. The model is updated with the next \(500\) data points from the stream.

dstream <- DSC_DStream(gridsize = 0.1, Cm = 1.2)
update(dstream,  stream_5G,  n=500)

First, let’s run the k-means clustering with \(k=5\) clusters and plot the resulting micro and macro clusters.

kmc <- DSC_Kmeans(k = 5)
recluster(kmc,   dstream)
plot(kmc, stream_5G, type = "both", xlab="X-axis", ylab="Y-axis")

In this clustering plot, micro-clusters are shown as circles and macro-clusters are shown as crosses and their sizes represent the corresponding cluster weight estimates.

Prior to updating the model with the next 1,000 data points from the stream, we specify the grid cells as micro-clusters, grid cell size (gridsize=0.1), and a micro-cluster (Cm=1.2) that specifies the density of a grid cell as a multiple of the average cell density.

dstream <- DSC_DStream(gridsize = 0.1, Cm = 1.2)
update(dstream,  stream_5G,  n=1000)

We can re-cluster the data using k-means with 5 clusters and plot the resulting micro and macro clusters.

km_G5 <- DSC_Kmeans(k = 5)
recluster(km_G5,   dstream)
plot(km_G5, stream_5G, type = "both")

Note the subtle changes in the clustering results after updating with the new batch of data.

1.3.5 Sources of Data Streams

1.3.5.1 Static structure streams

  • DSD_BarsAndGaussians generates two uniformly filled rectangles and two Gaussian clusters with different density.
  • DSD_Gaussians generates randomly placed static clusters with random multivariate Gaussian distributions.
  • DSD_mlbenchData provides streaming access to machine learning benchmark datasets found in the mlbench package.
  • DSD_mlbenchGenerator interfaces the generators for artificial data sets defined in the mlbench package.
  • DSD_Target generates a ball in a circle data set.
  • DSD_UniformNoise generates uniform noise in a d-dimensional (hyper) cube.

1.3.5.2 Concept drift streams

  • DSD_Benchmark provides a collection of simple benchmark problems including splitting and joining clusters, and changes in density or size, which can be used as a comprehensive benchmark set for algorithm comparison.
  • DSD_MG is a generator to specify complex data streams with concept drift. The shape as well as the behavior of each cluster over time can be specified using keyframes.
  • DSD_RandomRBFGeneratorEvents generates streams using radial base functions with noise. Clusters move, merge and split.

1.3.5.3 Real data streams

  • DSD_Memory provides a streaming interface to static, matrix-like data (e.g., a data frame, a matrix) in memory which represents a fixed portion of a data stream. Matrix-like objects also include large objects potentially stored on disk like ff::ffdf.
  • DSD_ReadCSV reads data line by line in text format from a file or an open connection and makes it available in a streaming fashion. This way data that is larger than the available main memory can be processed.
  • DSD_ReadDB provides an interface to an open result set from a SQL query to a relational database.

1.3.6 Printing, plotting and saving streams

For DSD objects, some basic stream functions include print(), plot() and write_stream(). These can save part of a data stream to disk. DSD_Memory and DSD_ReadCSV objects also include member functions like reset_stream() to reset the position in the stream to its beginning.

To request a new batch of data points from the stream we use get_points(). This chooses a random cluster (based on the probability weights in p_weight) and a point is drawn from the multivariate Gaussian distribution (\(mean=mu, covariance\ matrix=\Sigma\)) of that cluster. Below, we pull \(n = 10\) new data points from the stream.

new_p  <- get_points(stream_5G,  n  =  10)
new_p
##           X1         X2 .class
## 1  0.8733407 0.46265427      5
## 2  0.2381227 0.23825970      2
## 3  0.7980366 0.09936920      4
## 4  0.3088413 0.33481091      2
## 5  0.8717139 0.47762180      5
## 6  0.7269188 0.02644974      4
## 7  0.2558559 0.24844723      2
## 8  0.2533175 0.22967079      2
## 9  0.2882337 0.27945806      2
## 10 0.2324733 0.22381704      2
new_p  <- get_points(stream_5G,  n  =  100,  class  =  TRUE)
## Warning in .nodots(...): Unknown arguments: class = TRUE
head(new_p, n = 20)
##           X1         X2 .class
## 1  0.7795674 0.07913567      4
## 2  0.2249437 0.25580476      2
## 3  0.2460355 0.24467360      2
## 4  0.3111685 0.34150150      2
## 5  0.3967347 0.39527809      2
## 6  0.4966072 0.70748454      3
## 7  0.3302468 0.34697587      2
## 8  0.8073032 0.10314599      4
## 9  0.9400014 0.49830257      5
## 10 0.4783992 0.77695101      3
## 11 0.1469569 0.74732867      1
## 12 0.4106327 0.78666642      3
## 13 0.3618811 0.30656516      2
## 14 0.4933261 0.75555620      3
## 15 0.2687940 0.28681053      2
## 16 0.3187406 0.32997154      2
## 17 0.3354780 0.36332733      2
## 18 0.1461205 0.68213193      1
## 19 0.5221782 0.74109176      3
## 20 0.4959186 0.66092866      3
plot(stream_5G,  n  =  700,  method  =  "pc")

Note that if you add noise to your stream, e.g., stream_Noise <- DSD_Gaussians(k = 5, d = 4, noise = .1, p = c(0.1, 0.5, 0.3, 0.9, 0.1)), then the noise points won’t be part of any clusters and may have an NA class label.

1.3.7 Stream animation

Clusters can be animated over time by animate_data(). Use reset_stream() to start the animation at the beginning of the stream and note that this method is not implemented for streams of class DSD_Gaussians, DSD_R, DSD_data.frame, and DSD. We’ll create a new DSD_Benchmark data stream.

set.seed(12345)
stream_Bench <- DSD_Benchmark(1)
stream_Bench
## Benchmark 1: Two clusters moving diagonally from left to right, meeting
## in the center (d = 2, k = 2, 5% noise).Class: DSD_MG, DSD_R, DSD 
## With 3 clusters in 2 dimensions. Time is 1
library("animation")
reset_stream(stream_Bench)
animate_data(stream_Bench, n=10000, horizon=100, xlim = c(0, 1), ylim = c(0, 1))

# Generate a random LIST of images
# img.list <- as.list(NULL)
# for (i in 1:100)  img.list[[i]] <- imager::imnoise(x = 200, y = 200, z = 1)
# image(img.list[[1]][,,1,1])

This benchmark generator creates two 2D clusters moving in the plane. One moves from top-left to bottom-right, the other from bottom-left to top-right. When the pair of clusters meet at the center of the domain, they briefly overlap and then split again.

Concept drift in the stream can be depicted by requesting (\(10\)) times \(300\) data points from the stream and animating the plot. Fast-forwarding the stream can be accomplished by requesting, but ignoring, (\(2000\)) points in between the (\(10\)) plots.

for(i in 1:10) {
   plot(stream_Bench, 300, xlim = c(0, 1), ylim = c(0, 1))
   tmp <- get_points(stream_Bench, n = 2000)
}

reset_stream(stream_Bench)

# Uncomment this to see the animation
# animate_data(stream_Bench, n=8000, horizon = 120, xlim=c(0, 1), ylim=c(0, 1))

# Animations can be saved as HTML or GIF
#saveHTML(ani.replay(), htmlfile = "stream_Bench_Animation.html")
#saveGIF(ani.replay())

Streams can also be saved locally by write_stream(stream_Bench, "dataStreamSaved.csv", n = 100, sep=",") and loaded back in R by DSD_ReadCSV().

1.3.8 Case-Study: SOCR Knee Pain Data

These data represent the \(X\) and \(Y\) spatial knee-pain locations for over \(8,000\) patients, along with labels about the knee \(F\)ront, \(B\)ack, \(L\)eft and \(R\)ight. Let’s try to read the SOCR Knee Pain Datasest as a stream.

library("XML"); library("xml2"); library("rvest")

wiki_url <- read_html("https://wiki.socr.umich.edu/index.php/SOCR_Data_KneePainData_041409")
html_nodes(wiki_url, "#content")
## {xml_nodeset (1)}
## [1] <div id="content" class="mw-body" role="main">\n\t\t\t<a id="top"></a>\n\ ...
kneeRawData <- html_table(html_nodes(wiki_url, "table")[[2]])
normalize<-function(x){
  return((x-min(x))/(max(x)-min(x)))
}
kneeRawData_df <- as.data.frame(cbind(normalize(kneeRawData$x), normalize(kneeRawData$Y), as.factor(kneeRawData$View)))
colnames(kneeRawData_df) <- c("X", "Y", "Label")
# randomize the rows of the DF as RF, RB, LF and LB labels of classes are sequential
set.seed(1234)
kneeRawData_df <- kneeRawData_df[sample(nrow(kneeRawData_df)), ]
summary(kneeRawData_df)
##        X                Y              Label      
##  Min.   :0.0000   Min.   :0.0000   Min.   :1.000  
##  1st Qu.:0.1331   1st Qu.:0.4566   1st Qu.:2.000  
##  Median :0.2995   Median :0.5087   Median :3.000  
##  Mean   :0.3382   Mean   :0.5091   Mean   :2.801  
##  3rd Qu.:0.3645   3rd Qu.:0.5549   3rd Qu.:4.000  
##  Max.   :1.0000   Max.   :1.0000   Max.   :4.000
# View(kneeRawData_df)

We can use the DSD::DSD_Memory class to get a stream interface for matrix or data frame objects, like the Knee pain location dataset. The number of true clusters \(k=4\) in this dataset.

# use data.frame to create a stream (3rd column contains the label assignment)
kneeDF <- data.frame(x=kneeRawData_df[,1], y=kneeRawData_df[,2],
  .class=as.factor(kneeRawData_df[,3]))
head(kneeDF)
##            x         y .class
## 1 0.69096672 0.4479769      1
## 2 0.88431062 0.7716763      3
## 3 0.67828843 0.4393064      1
## 4 0.88589540 0.4421965      3
## 5 0.68621236 0.4739884      1
## 6 0.09350238 0.5664740      4
# streamKnee <- DSD_Memory(kneeDF[,c("x", "y")], class=kneeDF[,"class"], loop=T)
streamKnee <- DSD_Memory(kneeDF[,c("x", "y", ".class")], loop=T)
streamKnee
## Memorized Stream 
## Class: DSD_Memory, DSD_R, DSD 
## Contains 8666 data points - currently at position 1 - loop is TRUE
# define the stream classifier.
cl <- DSClassifier_SlidingWindow(class ~ x + y, window=50, rebuild=10)
cl
## Data Stream Classifier on a Sliding Window
## Function: rpart::rpart 
## Class: DSClassifier_SlidingWindow, DSClassifier, DST_SlidingWindow, DST
# Each time we get a point from *streamKnee*, the stream pointer moves to the next position (row) in the data.
get_points(streamKnee, n=10)
##             x         y .class
## 1  0.69096672 0.4479769      1
## 2  0.88431062 0.7716763      3
## 3  0.67828843 0.4393064      1
## 4  0.88589540 0.4421965      3
## 5  0.68621236 0.4739884      1
## 6  0.09350238 0.5664740      4
## 7  0.11568938 0.4971098      4
## 8  0.16164818 0.4566474      4
## 9  0.13153724 0.6242775      4
## 10 0.16323296 0.5780347      4
streamKnee
## Memorized Stream 
## Class: DSD_Memory, DSD_R, DSD 
## Contains 8666 data points - currently at position 11 - loop is TRUE
# Stream pointer is in position 11 now

# We can redirect the current position of the stream pointer by:
reset_stream(streamKnee,  pos  =  200)
get_points(streamKnee, n=10)
##              x         y .class
## 200 0.26465927 0.4161850      2
## 201 0.09033281 0.2543353      4
## 202 0.37717908 0.5693642      2
## 203 0.16798732 0.5375723      4
## 204 0.06180666 0.5202312      4
## 205 0.64817750 0.5520231      1
## 206 0.70206022 0.4566474      1
## 207 0.29001585 0.5693642      2
## 208 0.14104596 0.5289017      4
## 209 0.11885895 0.5202312      4
streamKnee
## Memorized Stream 
## Class: DSD_Memory, DSD_R, DSD 
## Contains 8666 data points - currently at position 210 - loop is TRUE

1.3.9 Data Stream clustering and classification (DSC)

Let’s demonstrate clustering using DSC_DStream, which assigns points to cells in a grid. First, initialize the clustering, as an empty cluster and then use the update() function to implicitly alter the mutable DSC object.

dsc_streamKnee <- DSC_DStream(gridsize = 0.1, Cm = 0.4, attraction=T)
dsc_streamKnee
## D-Stream 
## Class: DSC_DStream, DSC_Micro, DSC_R, DSC 
## Number of micro-clusters: 0 
## Number of macro-clusters: 0
# stream::update
reset_stream(streamKnee,  pos  =  1)

# update the classifier with 100 points from the stream
update(dsc_streamKnee, streamKnee,  n  =  500)
# update(cl, streamKnee,  n  =  500)

head(get_centers(dsc_streamKnee))
##      x    y
## 1 0.05 0.45
## 2 0.05 0.55
## 3 0.15 0.35
## 4 0.15 0.45
## 5 0.15 0.55
## 6 0.25 0.45
plot(dsc_streamKnee,  streamKnee, xlim=c(0,1), ylim=c(0,1))

# plot(dsc_streamKnee,  streamKnee, grid = TRUE)
# Micro-clusters are plotted in red on top of gray stream data points
# The size of the micro-clusters indicates their weight - it's proportional to the number of data points represented by each micro-cluster.
# Micro-clusters are shown as dense grid cells (density is coded with gray values).

The purity metric represent an external evaluation criterion of cluster quality, which is the proportion of the total number of points that were correctly classified: \(0\leq Purity = \frac{1}{N} \sum_{i=1}^k { \max_j a|c_i \cap t_j |} \leq 1\), where \(N\)=number of observed data points, \(k\) = number of clusters, \(c_i\) is the \(i\)th cluster, and \(t_j\) is the classification that has the maximum number of points with \(c_i\) class labels. High purity suggests that we correctly label points.

Next, we can use K-means clustering.

kMeans_Knee <- DSC_Kmeans(k = 5) # choose 4-5 clusters as we have 4 knee labels
recluster(kMeans_Knee, dsc_streamKnee)
plot(kMeans_Knee, streamKnee, type = "both")

animate_data(streamKnee, n=1000, horizon=100, xlim = c(0, 1), ylim = c(0, 1))

# purity <- animate_cluster(kMeans_Knee, streamKnee, n=2500, type="both", xlim=c(0,1), ylim=c(-,1), evaluationMeasure="purity", horizon=10)

animate_cluster(kMeans_Knee, streamKnee,  horizon = 100,  n = 5000, measure = "purity", plot.args = list(xlim = c(0, 1), ylim = c(0, 1)))

##    points    purity
## 1       0        NA
## 2     100 0.9000000
## 3     200 1.0000000
## 4     300 0.9818182
## 5     400 1.0000000
## 6     500 1.0000000
## 7     600 0.9333333
## 8     700 0.9104762
## 9     800 1.0000000
## 10    900 0.9555556
## 11   1000 1.0000000
## 12   1100 1.0000000
## 13   1200 1.0000000
## 14   1300 1.0000000
## 15   1400 1.0000000
## 16   1500 0.9130435
## 17   1600 1.0000000
## 18   1700 1.0000000
## 19   1800 1.0000000
## 20   1900 0.9529412
## 21   2000 1.0000000
## 22   2100 0.9360000
## 23   2200 0.9666667
## 24   2300 1.0000000
## 25   2400 1.0000000
## 26   2500 1.0000000
## 27   2600 0.9750000
## 28   2700 0.8809524
## 29   2800 0.9577381
## 30   2900 0.9846154
## 31   3000 0.9857143
## 32   3100 1.0000000
## 33   3200 1.0000000
## 34   3300 0.9222222
## 35   3400 0.8000000
## 36   3500 1.0000000
## 37   3600 1.0000000
## 38   3700 0.9339181
## 39   3800 0.9238095
## 40   3900 0.9750000
## 41   4000 0.8458333
## 42   4100 0.9062500
## 43   4200 1.0000000
## 44   4300 0.9933333
## 45   4400 0.9230769
## 46   4500 0.9666667
## 47   4600 0.9180451
## 48   4700 1.0000000
## 49   4800 0.9846154
## 50   4900 1.0000000

1.3.10 Evaluation of data stream clustering

# Synthetic Gaussian example
# stream <- DSD_Gaussians(k = 3, d = 2, noise = 0.05)
# dstream <- DSC_DStream(gridsize = 0.1)
# update(dstream,  stream,  n  =  2000)
# evaluate(dstream,  stream,  n  =  100)

evaluate_static(dsc_streamKnee, streamKnee,
         measure = c("crand", "SSQ", "silhouette"), n = 100,
         type = c("auto", "micro", "macro"), assign = "micro",
         assignmentMethod=c("auto", "model", "nn")) # , noise=c("class", "exclude"))
## Evaluation results for micro-clusters.
## Points were assigned to micro-clusters.
## 
##       cRand         SSQ  silhouette 
##  0.28474810  0.53860025 -0.03565456 
## attr(,"type")
## [1] "micro"
## attr(,"assign")
## [1] "micro"
clusterEval <- evaluate_stream(dsc_streamKnee, streamKnee, measure = c("numMicroClusters", "purity"), n=5000, horizon=100)
head(clusterEval)
##   points numMicroClusters    purity
## 1      0               14 0.9619048
## 2    100               15 0.9625000
## 3    200               17 0.9666667
## 4    300               19 0.9777778
## 5    400               20 0.9691358
## 6    500               19 0.9699248
# plot(clusterEval[ , "points"], clusterEval[ , "purity"], type = "l", ylab  =  "Avg Purity",  xlab  =  "Points")
library(plotly)

plot_ly(x=~clusterEval[ , "points"], y=~clusterEval[ , "purity"], type="scatter", mode="markers+lines") %>%
  layout(title="Streaming Data Classification (Knee Data): Average Cluster Purity",
         xaxis=list(title="Streaming Points"), yaxis=list(title="Average Purity"))
animate_cluster(dsc_streamKnee, streamKnee,  horizon  =  100,  n  =  5000, measure = "purity", plot.args = list(xlim = c(0, 1), ylim = c(0, 1)))

##    points    purity
## 1       0        NA
## 2     100 0.9764706
## 3     200 0.9682540
## 4     300 0.9833333
## 5     400 0.9629630
## 6     500 0.9625000
## 7     600 0.9761905
## 8     700 0.9736842
## 9     800 0.9625000
## 10    900 0.9803922
## 11   1000 0.9642857
## 12   1100 0.9671053
## 13   1200 0.9736842
## 14   1300 0.9785714
## 15   1400 0.9809524
## 16   1500 0.9647059
## 17   1600 0.9699248
## 18   1700 0.9700000
## 19   1800 0.9722222
## 20   1900 0.9691358
## 21   2000 0.9714286
## 22   2100 0.9841270
## 23   2200 0.9696970
## 24   2300 1.0000000
## 25   2400 0.9649123
## 26   2500 0.9841270
## 27   2600 0.9772727
## 28   2700 0.9800000
## 29   2800 0.9583333
## 30   2900 0.9777778
## 31   3000 0.9868421
## 32   3100 0.9809524
## 33   3200 0.9777778
## 34   3300 0.9714286
## 35   3400 0.9750000
## 36   3500 0.9875000
## 37   3600 0.9750000
## 38   3700 0.9714286
## 39   3800 0.9736842
## 40   3900 0.9714286
## 41   4000 0.9666667
## 42   4100 0.9736842
## 43   4200 0.9826087
## 44   4300 0.9789474
## 45   4400 0.9750000
## 46   4500 0.9800000
## 47   4600 0.9684211
## 48   4700 0.9649123
## 49   4800 0.9800000
## 50   4900 0.9750000

The dsc_streamKnee includes the clustering results, where \(n\) represents the data points taken from streamKnee. The evaluation measure can be specified as a vector of character strings. Points are assigned to clusters in dsc_streamKnee using get_assignment() and can be used to assess the quality of the classification. By default, points are assigned to micro-clusters, or can be assigned to macro-cluster centers by assign = "macro". Also, new points can be assigned to clusters by the rule used in the clustering algorithm by assignmentMethod = "model" or using nearest-neighbor assignment (nn).

1.4 Optimization and improving the computational performance

Just like we noticed in previous chapters, e.g., Chapter 9, streaming classification in R may be slow and memory-inefficient. These problems may become severe, especially for datasets with millions of records or when using complex functions. There are packages for processing large datasets and memory optimizationbigmemory, biganalytics, bigtabulate, etc.

1.4.1 Generalizing tabular data structures with dplyr

We have also seen long execution times when running processes that ingest, store or manipulate huge data.frame objects. The dplyr package, created by Hadley Wickham and Romain Francoi, provides a faster route to manage such large datasets in R. It creates an object called tbl, similar to data.frame, which has an in-memory column-like structure. R reads these objects a lot faster than data frames.

To make a tbl object we can either convert an existing data frame to tbl or connect to an external database. Converting from data frame to tbl is quite easy. All we need to do is call the function as.tbl().

#install.packages("dplyr")
library(dplyr)
nof1_tbl<-as.tbl(nof1)
nof1_tbl
## # A tibble: 900 × 10
##       id   day    tx selfeff selfeff25  wpss scssuppt  pmss pmss3 qhyact
##    <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>   <dbl>     <dbl> <dbl>    <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>  <dbl>
##  1     1     1     1      33         8  0.97     5     4.03  1.03     53
##  2     1     2     1      33         8 -0.17     3.87  4.03  1.03     73
##  3     1     3     0      33         8  0.81     4.84  4.03  1.03     23
##  4     1     4     0      33         8 -0.41     3.62  4.03  1.03     36
##  5     1     5     1      33         8  0.59     4.62  4.03  1.03     21
##  6     1     6     1      33         8 -1.16     2.87  4.03  1.03      0
##  7     1     7     0      33         8  0.3      4.33  4.03  1.03     21
##  8     1     8     0      33         8 -0.34     3.69  4.03  1.03      0
##  9     1     9     1      33         8 -0.74     3.29  4.03  1.03     73
## 10     1    10     1      33         8 -0.38     3.66  4.03  1.03    114
## # ℹ 890 more rows

This looks like a normal data frame. If you are using R Studio by viewing the nof1_tbl you can see the same output as nof1.

1.4.2 Making data frames faster with data.table

Similar to tbl, the data.table package provides another alternative to data frame object representation. data.table objects are processed in R much faster compared to standard data frames. Also, all of the functions that can accept data frames could be applied to data.table objects as well. The function fread() is able to read a local CSV file directly into a data.table.

# install.packages("data.table")
library(data.table)
nof1 <- fread("C:/Users/IvoD/Desktop/02_Nof1_Data.csv")

Another amazing property of data.table is that we can use subscripts to access a specific location in the dataset just like dataset[row, column]. It also allows the selection of rows with Boolean expression and direct application of functions to those selected rows. Note that column names can be used to call the specific column in data.table, whereas with data frames, we have to use the dataset$columnName syntax).

nof1[id==1, mean(qhyact)]
## [1] 52.66667

This useful functionality can also help us run complex operations with only a few lines of code. One of the drawbacks of using data.table objects is that they are still limited by the available system memory.

1.4.3 Creating disk-based data frames with ff

The ff (fast-files) package allows us to overcome the RAM limitations of finite system memory. For example, it helps with operating datasets with billion rows. ff creates objects in ffdf formats, which is like a map that points to a location of the data on a disk. However, this makes ffdf objects inapplicable for most R functions. The only way to address this problem is to break the huge dataset into small chunks. After processing a batch of these small chunks, we have to combine the results to reconstruct the complete output. This strategy is relevant in parallel computing, which will be discussed in detail in the next section. First, let’s download one of the large datasets in our datasets archive, UQ_VitalSignsData_Case04.csv.

# install.packages("ff")
library(ff)
# vitalsigns<-read.csv.ffdf(file="UQ_VitalSignsData_Case04.csv", header=T)
vitalsigns <- read.csv.ffdf(file="https://umich.instructure.com/files/366335/download?download_frd=1", header=T)

As mentioned earlier, we cannot apply functions directly on this ff object, e.g.,

mean(vitalsigns$Pulse)
## Warning in mean.default(vitalsigns$Pulse): argument is not numeric or logical:
## returning NA
## [1] NA

For basic data calculations, we can download another package ffbase. This allows operations on ffdf objects using simple tasks like: mathematical operations, query functions, summary statistics and bigger regression models using packages like biglm, which will be mentioned later in this chapter.

# Install RTools: https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/
# install.packages("ffbase")
## ff vs. ffbase package incompatibility:
# https://forums.ohdsi.org/t/solving-error-object-is-factor-ff-is-not-exported-by-namespace-ff/11745
# Downgrade ff package to 2.2.14
# install.packages("C:/Users/IvoD/Desktop/ff_2.2-14.tar.gz", repos = NULL, type="source")
library(ffbase)
mean(vitalsigns$Pulse)

1.4.4 Using massive matrices with bigmemory

The previously introduced packages include alternatives to data.frames. For instance, the bigmemory package creates alternative objects to 2D matrices (second-order tensors). It can store huge datasets and can be divided into small chunks that can be converted to data frames. However, we cannot directly apply machine learning methods on these types of objects. More detailed information about the bigmemory package is available online.

1.5 Parallel computing

In previous chapters, we saw various machine learning techniques applied as serial computing tasks. The traditional protocol involves the following steps. First, applying function 1 to our raw data. Then, using the output from function 1 as an input to function 2. This process is iterated for a series of functions. Finally, we have the terminal output generated by the last function. This serial or linear computing method is straightforward but time consuming and perhaps sub-optimal.

Now we introduce a more efficient way of computing - parallel computing, which provides a mechanism to deal with different tasks at the same time and combine the outputs for all of the processes to get the final answer faster. However, parallel algorithms may require special conditions and cannot be applied to all problems. If two tasks have to be run in a specific order, this problem cannot be parallelized.

1.5.1 Measuring execution time

To measure how much time can be saved for different methods, we can use the function system.time().

system.time(mean(vitalsigns$Pulse))
## Warning in mean.default(vitalsigns$Pulse): argument is not numeric or logical:
## returning NA
##    user  system elapsed 
##       0       0       0

This means calculating the mean of the Pulse column in the vitalsigns dataset takes 0.001 seconds. These values will vary between computers, operating systems, and states of operations.

1.5.2 Parallel processing with multiple cores

We will introduce two packages for parallel computing multicore and snow (their core components are included in the package parallel). They both have a different way of multitasking. However, to run these packages, you need to have a relatively modern multicore computer. Let’s check how many cores your computer has. This function parallel::detectCores() provides this functionality. parallel is a base package, so there is no need to install it prior to using it.

library(parallel)
detectCores()
## [1] 20

This reports that there are eight (8) cores on the computer used to compile and knit the Rmarkdown source of the DSPA book content. In this case, we can run up to 6–7 parallel jobs on this computer, never use all cores for computing as this will overwhelm the core state of the machine.

The multicore package simply uses the multitasking capabilities of the kernel, the computer’s operating system, to “fork” additional R sessions that share the same memory. Imagine that we open several R sessions in parallel and let each of them do part of the work. Now, let’s examine how this can save time when running complex protocols or dealing with large datasets. To start with, we can use the mclapply() function, which is similar to lapply(), which applies functions to a vector and returns a vector of lists. Instead of applying functions to vectors mcapply() divides the complete computational task and delegates portions of it to each available core. We will apply a simple, yet time consuming, task - generating random numbers - for demonstrating this procedure. Also, we can use the system.time() to track the time differences.

set.seed(123)
system.time(c1<-rnorm(10000000))
##    user  system elapsed 
##    0.09    0.00    0.27
# Note the multi core calls may not work on Windows, but will work on Linux/Mac.
#This shows a 2-core and 4-vore invocations
# system.time(c2<-unlist(mclapply(1:2, function(x){rnorm(5000000)}, mc.cores = 2)))
# system.time(c4<-unlist(mclapply(1:4, function(x){rnorm(2500000)}, mc.cores = 4)))

# And here is a Windows (single core invocation)
library(parallel)
numWorkers <- 4
cl <-makeCluster(numWorkers, type="PSOCK")
system.time(c2 <- unlist(parLapply(cl,1:10, function(x) {rnorm(10000000)})))
##    user  system elapsed 
##    0.19    0.07    1.72
stopCluster(cl)

The unlist() is used at the end to combine results from different cores into a single vector. Each line of code creates \(10,000,000\) random numbers. The generation of the c1 output uses the default R single core invocation, which uses the most CPU time. The c2 output used two cores to complete the task (each core handles \(5,000,000\) (half) of the random number generations, and uses less time than the first one. The final output, c4, uses four cores for the task and reduces the computing time even further. Clearly, using additional cores significantly shrinks the overall execution time.

The snow package allows parallel computing on multicore multiprocessor machines or a network of multiple machines. It might be more difficult to use but it’s also certainly more flexible. First we can set how many cores we want to use via the makeCluster() function.

# install.packages("snow")
library(snow)
cl<-makeCluster(2)

This call might cause a pop-up message warning about access through the firewall. To do the same task we can use the parLapply() function in the snow package. Note that we have to call the object we created with the previous makeCluster() function.

system.time(c2<-unlist(parLapply(cl, c(5000000, 5000000), function(x) {rnorm(x)})))
##    user  system elapsed 
##    0.01    0.02    0.22

While using parLapply(), we have to specify the matrix and the function that will be applied to this matrix. Remember to stop the cluster we made after completing the task, to release back the system resources.

stopCluster(cl)

1.5.3 Parallelization using foreach and doParallel

The foreach package provides another option of parallel computing. It relies on a loop-like process basically applying a specified function for each item in the set, which again is somewhat similar to apply(), lapply() and other regular functions. The interesting thing is that these loops can be computed in parallel saving substantial amounts of time. The foreach package alone cannot provide parallel computing. We have to combine it with other packages like doParallel. Let’s reexamine the task of creating a vector of 10,000,000 random numbers. First, register the 4 compute cores using registerDoParallel().

# install.packages("doParallel")
library(doParallel)
cl<-makeCluster(4)
registerDoParallel(cl)

Then we can examine the time saving foreach command.

#install.packages("foreach")
library(foreach)
system.time(c4 <- foreach(i=1:4, .combine = 'c') %dopar% rnorm(2500000) )
##    user  system elapsed 
##    0.04    0.03    0.17

Here we used four items (each item runs on a separate core), .combine=c allows foreach to combine the results with the parameter c() generating the aggregate result vector.

Also, don’t forget to close the doParallel by registering the sequential backend.

unregister <- registerDoSEQ()

1.5.4 GPU computing

Modern computers have graphics cards, GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), that consist of thousands of cores, however they are very specialized, unlike the standard CPU chip. If we can use this feature for parallel computing, we may reach amazing performance improvements, at the cost of complicating the processing algorithms and increasing the constraints on the data format. Specific disadvantages of GPU computing include relying on a proprietary manufacturer (e.g., NVidia) frameworks and Complete Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) programming language. CUDA allows programming of GPU instructions into a common computing language. This paper provides one example of using GPU computation to significantly improve the performance of advanced neuroimaging and brain mapping processing of multidimensional data.

The R package gputools is created for parallel computing using NVidia CUDA. Detailed GPU computing in R information is available online.

1.6 Deploying optimized learning algorithms

As we mentioned earlier, some tasks can be parallelized easier than others. In real world situations, we can pick the algorithms that lend themselves well to parallelization. Some of the R packages that allow parallel computing using ML algorithms are listed below.

1.6.1 Building bigger regression models with biglm

The R biglm package allows training regression models with data from SQL databases or large data chunks obtained from the ff package. The output is similar to the standard lm() function that builds linear models. However, biglm operates efficiently on massive datasets.

1.6.2 Growing bigger and faster random forests with bigrf

The bigrf package can be used to train random forests combining the foreach and doParallel packages. In Chapter 9, we presented random forests as machine learners ensembling multiple tree learners. With parallel computing, we can split the task of creating thousands of trees into smaller tasks that can be outsourced to each available compute core. We only need to combine the results at the end. Then, we will obtain the exact same output in a relatively shorter amount of time.

1.6.3 Training and evaluation models in parallel with caret

Combining the caret package with foreach and we can obtain a powerful method to deal with time-consuming tasks like building a random forest learner. Utilizing the same example we presented in Chapter 9, we can see the time difference of utilizing the foreach package.

#library(caret)
system.time(m_rf <- train(CHARLSONSCORE ~ ., data=qol, method="rf", metric="Kappa", trControl=ctrl, tuneGrid=grid_rf))
##    user  system elapsed 
##   41.02    0.42   91.65

It took a couple of minutes to finish this task in the standard (single core) execution model, relying purely on the regular caret function. Below, this same model training completes much faster using parallelization; about 1/4 of the time compared to the standard call above.

set.seed(123)
cl<-makeCluster(4)
registerDoParallel(cl)
getDoParWorkers()
## [1] 4
system.time(m_rf <- train(CHARLSONSCORE ~ ., data = qol, method = "rf", metric = "Kappa", trControl = ctrl, tuneGrid = grid_rf))
##    user  system elapsed 
##    1.25    0.00   31.29
unregister<-registerDoSEQ()
stopCluster(cl)

Note that the call to train remains the same, no need to specify parallelization in the call. It automatically utilizes all available resources, in this case 4 cores. The execution time is reduced from about 120 seconds (in the standard single core environment) down to 40 seconds (in the cluster setting).

1.7 R Notebook support for other programming languages

library(tidyverse)
library(kableExtra)
library(gridExtra)
library(viridis)

The R markdown notebook allows the user to execute jobs in a number of different kinds of software platforms. In addition to R, one can define Python, C/C++, and many other languages. The complete list of knitr package supported scripting and compiled languages include:

names(knitr::knit_engines$get())
##  [1] "awk"       "bash"      "coffee"    "gawk"      "groovy"    "haskell"  
##  [7] "lein"      "mysql"     "node"      "octave"    "perl"      "php"      
## [13] "psql"      "Rscript"   "ruby"      "sas"       "scala"     "sed"      
## [19] "sh"        "stata"     "zsh"       "asis"      "asy"       "block"    
## [25] "block2"    "bslib"     "c"         "cat"       "cc"        "comment"  
## [31] "css"       "ditaa"     "dot"       "embed"     "eviews"    "exec"     
## [37] "fortran"   "fortran95" "go"        "highlight" "js"        "julia"    
## [43] "python"    "R"         "Rcpp"      "sass"      "scss"      "sql"      
## [49] "stan"      "targets"   "tikz"      "verbatim"  "glue"      "glue_sql" 
## [55] "gluesql"

In this section, we will demonstrate the use of Python within R and the seamless integration between R, Python, and C/C++ libraries. This functionality substantially enriches the already comprehensive collection of thousands of existent R libraries, as well as, provides a mechanism to improve significantly the performance of any R protocol by outsourcing some of the heavy-duty calculations to external (compiled) C/C++ executables.

1.7.1 R-Python integration

RStudio has a quick demo of the reticulate package, which provides access to tools and enables the interoperability between Python and R.

We will demonstrate this interoperability by fitting some models using Python’s scikit-learn library.

1.7.2 Installing Python

Users need to first install Python on their local machines by downloading the software for the appropriate operating system:

  • Windows: For Windows OS, depending on the system’s processor (CPU chipset), it’s recommended to download the appropriate Windows x86-64 executable installer, for 64-bit systems, or Windows x86 executable installer, for 32-bit systems. In general, installing the more powerful 64-bit version is recommended to improve performance.
  • Mac OS: For OS system, please make sure to download the proper version of the macOS 64-bit/32-bit installer.

Under the download heading “Stable Releases”, select any Python 3 version. Note that certain configurations may require downloading and installing an earlier Python version \(\leq 3.8\).

NOTE: There may be a temporary incompatibility issue between the reticulate package and the latest Python version (e.g., \(\geq 3.9\)). It may be safer to download and install a slightly older Python 3 version. If downloading the LATEST Python 3 release fails the testing below, try to reinstall an earlier Python version and try the tests below again.

Once downloaded, run the installer following the prompts.

1.7.3 Install the reticulate package

We need to load the (pre-installed) reticulate package and point to the specific directory of the local Python installation on your local machine. You can either manually type in the PATH to Python or use Sys.which("python3") to find it automatically, which may not work well if you don’t have the system environmental variables correctly set.

1.7.4 Installing and importing Python Modules

Additional Python modules can be installed either using a shell/terminal window for Mac OS system or cmd window for Windows OS. In the command shell window, type in pip install and append it by the names of the modules you want to install (e.g., pip install pandas) and press Enter. The module should be automatically downloaded and installed on the local machine. Please make sure to install all of the required modules (e.g., pandas, sklearn) before you move onto the next stage. Some of these additional packages may be automatically installed by a conda python installation.

Following a successful installation of the add-on packages, we can import python and any additional modules into the R environment. Note the new notebook specification {python}, instead of {r}, in the chunk of executable code.

NOTE: RStudio version must be \(2023\ +\) to allow passing objects between R, Python, and any other of the languages that can be invoked in the R markdown notebook. See this RStudio Reticulate video.

Let’s demonstrate the integration or R with external Python functions as well as directly within the same Rmarkdown electronic notebook using ```{python … }’’’ blocks of code.

We can call external Python functions directly in R via the reticulate::source_python(’*.py’). In this example, we are using this Python function, getEvenNumbers(), which takes a vector or numbers and returns a sub-vector only containing the even numbers from the input. Mind that this R-Python integration is done within an R block of code, not as we showed earlier in a separate Python code block. The input is an R object, the calculations are done purely by an external Python function, and the Python result is automatically converted to an R object, which at the end is printed out.

writeLines(strsplit(Sys.getenv("PATH"), ";")[[1]])
### <Start_Python_Code>
# # Pretest this function on colab before integrating within R/RStudio:
# # https://colab.research.google.com/
# # Mind Python strict code formatting principles: https://peps.python.org/pep-0008/
# 
# # Define an external Python function that takes a numerical object 
# # and returns an object including only the even numbers from the input
# def getEvenNumbers(numbers):
#   even_nums = [num for num in numbers if not num % 2]
#   return even_nums
# 
# # Uncomment next line to Test the getEvenNumbers() function
# # getEvenNumbers([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 2.2, 1000000000000000])
# # Result should be: [2, 4, 6, 1000000000000000]
### <End_Python_Code>
# detach("package:reticulate", unload=TRUE)

### R code
# First source the Python code: for local Python files: reticulate::source_python("/path/meanCPP.cpp")
library(devtools)
library(reticulate)

# Local test: 
# reticulate::source_python('C:/Users/user/Desktop/evenNumbersPythonFunction.py')
sourceURL <- "https://socr.umich.edu/DSPA2/DSPA2_notes/evenNumbersPythonFunction.py"
localSource <- "evenNumbersPythonFunction.py"
download.file(url=sourceURL, destfile=localSource)
source_python('evenNumbersPythonFunction.py')

# R data object (a numerical vector)
rInputVector <- c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 2.2, 1000000000000000)
# Call the python function and retrieve the python result auto-converted as R object!
rOutputResults <- getEvenNumbers(rInputVector)

cat("R-data object ")
## R-data object
cat(rInputVector)
## 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 2.2 1e+15
cat("is sent to external Python function, evenNumbersPythonFunction.py,")
## is sent to external Python function, evenNumbersPythonFunction.py,
cat("which is executed via reticulate package and the result object ")
## which is executed via reticulate package and the result object
cat(rOutputResults)
## 2 4 6 1e+15
cat(" is accessible/printed in R!")
##  is accessible/printed in R!
# paste0("Output result of call to Python function: ", rOutputResults)

Next, we’ll showcase R-Python integration directly into RStudio/Rmarkdown notebook.

# import the necessary python packages (pandas) and sub-packages (sklearn.tree.DecisionTreeClassifier)

# Use the Anaconda shell to install the scikit-learn Python Package
#  %> conda install anaconda::scikit-learn

import pandas
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn.tree import DecisionTreeClassifier

1.7.5 Python-based data modeling

Let’s load the iris data in R, pass it onto Python, and split it into training and testing sets using the sklearn.tree.train_test_split() method.

# Define the data in R but make it available in the Python env context (py$)
iris[1:6,]
##   Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
## 1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa
## 2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa
## 3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2  setosa
## 4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2  setosa
## 5          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2  setosa
## 6          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4  setosa
# repl_python()
py$iris_data <- iris

Note that some of the code in this section of the Rmarkdown notebook delimited between \[\begin{align*} &{\text{```{python ...} }}\\ &{\text{... <python code block> ... }}\\ &{\text{```}}\end{align*}\] is python, not R, e.g., train_test_split(), DecisionTreeClassifier().

# This is a ```{python ...}``` code block!
# report the first 5 cases of the data within Python
print(r.iris[1:6])
##    Sepal.Length  Sepal.Width  Petal.Length  Petal.Width Species
## 1           4.9          3.0           1.4          0.2  setosa
## 2           4.7          3.2           1.3          0.2  setosa
## 3           4.6          3.1           1.5          0.2  setosa
## 4           5.0          3.6           1.4          0.2  setosa
## 5           5.4          3.9           1.7          0.4  setosa
# Split the data in Python (use random seed for reproducibility)
train, test = train_test_split(r.iris, test_size = 0.4, random_state = 4321)

X = train.drop('Species', axis = 1)
y = train.loc[:, 'Species'].values
X_test = test.drop('Species', axis = 1)
y_test = test.loc[:, 'Species'].values

Let’s pull back into R the first 5 training observations (\(X\)) from the Python object. Note that \(X\) is a Python object generated in the Python chunk that we are now processing within the R chunk. Mind the use of the py$ prefix to the object (py$X). As the train_test_split() method does random selection of rows (cases) into the training and testing sets, the top 5 cases reported in the initial ordering of the cases by R may be different from the top 5 cases reported after the Python block processing.

# R
py$X %>% head(6)
##    Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width
## 41          4.5         2.3          1.3         0.3
## 16          5.4         3.9          1.3         0.4
## 26          5.0         3.4          1.6         0.4
## 99          5.7         2.8          4.1         1.3
## 5           5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4
## 85          6.0         3.4          4.5         1.6

Next, we will fit a simple decision tree model within Python using sklearn on the training data and evaluate its performance on the independent testing set and visualize the results in R.

# Model fitting in Python
tree = DecisionTreeClassifier(random_state=4321)
clf = tree.fit(X, y)
pred = clf.predict(X_test)
pred[1:6]
## array(['setosa', 'virginica', 'virginica', 'setosa', 'virginica'],
##       dtype=object)

1.7.6 Visualization of the results in R

To begin with, we will pull the Python pandas dataset into an R object.

# Store python pandas object as R tibble and identify correct and incorrect predicted labels
library(kableExtra)
library(tibble)
foo <- py$test %>%
  as_tibble() %>%
  rename(truth = Species) %>%
  mutate(predicted = as.factor(py$pred),
         correct = (truth == predicted))

foo %>%
  head(5) %>%
  select(-Petal.Length, -Petal.Width) %>%
  kable() %>%
  kable_styling()
Sepal.Length Sepal.Width truth predicted correct
5.4 3.4 setosa setosa TRUE
5.1 3.3 setosa setosa TRUE
5.9 3.2 versicolor virginica FALSE
6.3 3.3 virginica virginica TRUE
5.1 3.8 setosa setosa TRUE

Finally, we can plot in R the testing-data results and compare the real iris flower taxa labels (colors) and their predicted-label counterparts (shapes).

# R
# p1 <- py$test %>%
#   ggplot(aes(py$test$Petal.Length, py$test$Petal.Width, color = py$test$Species)) + # Species == py$y
#   geom_point(size = 4) +
#   labs(x = "Petal Length", y = "Petal Width") +
#   theme_bw() +
#   theme(legend.position = "none") +
#   ggtitle("Raw Testing Data Iris Differences",
#           subtitle = str_c("Petal Length and Width vary",
#                            "\n", "significantly between species"))
#
# p2 <- py$test %>%
#   ggplot(aes(py$test$Petal.Length, py$test$Petal.Width,
#              color = py$test$Species), shape=as.factor(py$pred)) +
#   geom_point(size = 4, aes(shape=as.factor(py$pred), color = py$test$Species)) +
#   labs(x = "Petal Length", y = "Petal Width") +
#   #theme_bw() +
#   theme(legend.position = "right") +
#   #scale_shape_manual(name="Species",
#   #                     values=as.factor(py$pred), labels=as.factor(py$pred)) +
#   ggtitle("Raw (Colors) vs. Predicted (Shape)\n Iris Differences",
#           subtitle = str_c("Petal Length and Width between species"))
#
# grid.arrange(p1, p2, layout_matrix = rbind(c(1,3)))

library(plotly)

plot_ly(py$test, x=~py$test$Petal.Length, y=~py$test$Petal.Width, color = ~py$test$Species,
        symbol = ~as.factor(py$pred), type="scatter", marker = list(size = 20), mode="markers") %>%
  layout(title="Python Iris Taxa Prediction: Raw (Colors) vs. Predicted (Shape) Species",
         xaxis=list(title="Petal Length"), xaxis=list(title="Petal Width"),
         legend = list(orientation='h'))

1.7.7 R integration with C/C++

There are many alternative ways to blend R and C/C++/Cpp code. The simplest approach may be to use inline C++ functional directly in R via the cppFunction(). Alternatively, we can keep C++ source files completely independent and sourceCpp() them into R for indirect use. Here is an example of a stand-alone C++ program meanCPP()computing the mean and standard deviation of a vector input. To try this, save the C++ code below in a text file: meanCPP.cpp and invoke it within R. Note that the C++ code can also include R method calls, e.g., sdR()!

Note: This R/C++ integration requires Rtools package and the make function, as well as proper PATH environment variable setting, which can be checked and set by:

writeLines(strsplit(Sys.getenv("PATH"), ";")[[1]])
### <Start_CPP_Code>
# #include <Rcpp.h>
# using namespace Rcpp;  // this is a required name-space declaration in the C++ code
# 
# /*** functions that will be used within R are prefixed with: `// [[Rcpp::export]]`.
#   We can compile the C++ code within R by *sourceCpp("/path_to/meanCPP.cpp")*. 
#   These compiled functions can be used in R, but can't be saved in a `.Rdata` files
#   and need to always be reloaded prior to reuse after `R` restart. 
# */
# 
# // [[Rcpp::export]]
# double meanCPP(NumericVector vec) {
#   int n = vec.size();
#   double total = 0;
# 
#   for(int i = 0; i < n; ++i) { // mind the C++ indexing starts at zero, not 1, as in R
#     total += vec[i];
#   }
#   return total/n;
# }
# /*** R
# # This is R code embedded in C++ to compute the SD of a vector
# sdR <- function (vec) {
#   return(sd(vec))
# }
# */
### <End_CPP_Code>

Next, we will demonstrate the R and C++ integration.

### R code
# First source C++ code: for local C++ files: sourceCpp("/path/meanCPP.cpp")
library(devtools)
library(Rcpp)
# install.packages("miniUI")
# library(miniUI)
# install.packages("pkgbuild")
library(pkgbuild)

sourceURL <- "https://www.socr.umich.edu/people/dinov/courses/DSPA_notes/meanCPP.cpp"
localSource <- "meanCPP.cpp"
download.file(url=sourceURL, destfile=localSource)
sourceCpp("meanCPP.cpp")
## 
## > sdR <- function(vec) {
## +     return(sd(vec))
## + }
# Call outside C++ meanCPP() method
r_vec <- rnorm(10^8) # generate 100M random values & compare computational complexity
system.time(m1 <- mean(r_vec))    # R solution
##    user  system elapsed 
##    0.06    0.00    0.12
system.time(m2 <- meanCPP(r_vec)) # C++ solution
##    user  system elapsed 
##    0.03    0.00    0.06
round(m1-m2, 5)  # Difference of mean calculations?
## [1] 0
# Compare the sdR() function defined within C++ using R methods to base::sd()
s1 <- sdR(r_vec); round(s1, 3) # remember the data is N(mean=0, sd=1)
## [1] 1
s2 <- sd(r_vec)
round(s1-s2, 5)
## [1] 0

Notice that the C++ method meanCPP() is faster in computing the mean compared to the native R base::mean().

1.8 Practice problem

Try to analyze the co-appearance network in the novel “Les Miserablese”. The data contains the weighted network of co-appearances of characters in Victor Hugo’s novel “Les Miserables”. Nodes represent characters as indicated by the labels and edges connect any pair of characters that appear in the same chapter of the book. The values on the edges are the number of such co-appearances.

miserablese <- read.table("https://umich.instructure.com/files/330389/download?download_frd=1", sep="", header=F)
head(miserablese)
##               V1             V2
## 1         Myriel       Napoleon
## 2         Myriel MlleBaptistine
## 3         Myriel    MmeMagloire
## 4 MlleBaptistine    MmeMagloire
## 5         Myriel   CountessDeLo
## 6         Myriel       Geborand

Also, try to interrogate some of the larger datasets we have using alternative parallel computing and big data analytics.

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