# Speed up sorting algorithm in R: make one column “smaller” than the other

Consider the following sorting algorithm:

df <- data.frame(food_1 = c("APPLE 1534", "PEAR 2525", "BANANA 3045", "WATERMELON 5000"),
food_2 = c("ORANGE 2035", "BROCCOLI 5000", "BLUEBERRY 2000", "TOMATO 3000"),
stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

# Sorting
for (i in 1:nrow(df)){
foods <- sort(c(df$food_1[i], df$food_2[i]))
df$food_1[i] <- foods[1] df$food_2[i] <- foods[2]
}


I have data frames which are of size 250,000+ rows that I've used the code above for, and I'm not sure how to make this more efficient.

• The other option I can think of would be transposing and sorting with an apply, which is just a loop. – Anonymous coward Oct 19 '18 at 18:48
• Can you confirm that you are only looking to sort two columns as in your example, and that the answer won't need to generalize to more (>2) columns? – flodel Oct 19 '18 at 23:25
• @flodel Eventually I will need to, but for now, let's just focus on the two-column case. If it generalizes to more than 2, that would be a bonus at this point. I will eventually need to extend to a 4-column case, but no more than that. – Clarinetist Oct 20 '18 at 1:55

I would use the vectorized functions pmin and pmax to compute the two vectors of minimum and maximum values respectively:

f1 <- pmin(df$food_1, df$food_2)
f2 <- pmax(df$food_1, df$food_2)
df$food_1 <- f1 df$food_2 <- f2


If you want, you can do it all in one statement:

df[c('food_1', 'food_2')] <- list(pmin(df$food_1, df$food_2),
pmax(df$food_1, df$food_2))


Another vectorized approach could use ifelse:

f1 <- ifelse(df$food_1 < df$food_2, df$food_1, df$food_2)
f2 <- ifelse(df$food_1 < df$food_2, df$food_2, df$food_1)
df$food_1 <- f1 df$food_2 <- f2


Testing on a large data.frame of 250k rows like you mentioned:

n <- 250000
df <- data.frame(food_1 = sample(c("APPLE 1534", "PEAR 2525",
"BANANA 3045", "WATERMELON 5000"), n, replace = TRUE),
food_2 = sample(c("ORANGE 2035", "BROCCOLI 5000",
"BLUEBERRY 2000", "TOMATO 3000"), n, replace = TRUE),
stringsAsFactors = FALSE)


both approaches are quite fast, e.g.:

system.time({
df[c('food_1', 'food_2')] <- list(pmin(df$food_1, df$food_2),
pmax(df$food_1, df$food_2))
})
#   user  system elapsed
#  0.150   0.001   0.151


while Andreas' solution takes ~10 seconds and yours would take over 30 minutes if I extrapolate correctly.

You solution does the job, but it is often better to vectorise your code. See the following example. First get the ordering of all elements in column a and b and then use this to rearrange the elements in the data.frame.

library(tictoc) #to get the run time

df <- data.frame(a = runif(10000),
b = runif(10000))

tic()
df.loop <- df
for (i in 1:nrow(df.loop)){
df.loop[i, ] <- sort(df.loop[i, ])
}
toc()

#sort (order) only once
tic()
index.a <- 1:nrow(df)
index.b <- (nrow(df) + 1) : (2*nrow(df))
a.b.ordered <- order(c(df[, 1], df[, 2]))
b.greater.a <- match(index.b, a.b.ordered) < match(index.a, a.b.ordered)
df.index <- df
df.index[b.greater.a, 1] <- df[b.greater.a, 2]
df.index[b.greater.a, 2] <- df[b.greater.a, 1]
toc()

identical(df.loop, df.index)

• Please write something more about your solution. Posting code-only answers is off-topic. There need to be a review too. – t3chb0t Oct 19 '18 at 19:08