Fastest way to replace NAs in a large data.table

Question

I have a large data.table, with many missing values scattered throughout its ~200k rows and 200 columns. I would like to re code those NA values to zeros as efficiently as possible.

I see two options:
1: Convert to a data.frame, and use something like this
2: Some kind of cool data.table sub setting command

I'll be happy with a fairly efficient solution of type 1. Converting to a data.frame and then back to a data.table won't take too long.

Answer 1

Here's a solution using data.table's := operator, building on Andrie and Ramnath's answers.

require(data.table)  # v1.6.6
require(gdata)       # v2.8.2

set.seed(1)
dt1 = create_dt(2e5, 200, 0.1)
dim(dt1)
[1] 200000    200    # more columns than Ramnath's answer which had 5 not 200

f_andrie = function(dt) remove_na(dt)

f_gdata = function(dt, un = 0) gdata::NAToUnknown(dt, un)

f_dowle = function(dt) {     # see EDIT later for more elegant solution
  na.replace = function(v,value=0) { v[is.na(v)] = value; v }
  for (i in names(dt))
    eval(parse(text=paste("dt[,",i,":=na.replace(",i,")]")))
}

system.time(a_gdata = f_gdata(dt1)) 
   user  system elapsed 
 18.805  12.301 134.985 

system.time(a_andrie = f_andrie(dt1))
Error: cannot allocate vector of size 305.2 Mb
Timing stopped at: 14.541 7.764 68.285 

system.time(f_dowle(dt1))
  user  system elapsed 
 7.452   4.144  19.590     # EDIT has faster than this

identical(a_gdata, dt1)   
[1] TRUE

Note that f_dowle updated dt1 by reference. If a local copy is required then an explicit call to the copy function is needed to make a local copy of the whole dataset. data.table's setkey, key<- and := do not copy-on-write.

Next, let's see where f_dowle is spending its time.

Rprof()
f_dowle(dt1)
Rprof(NULL)
summaryRprof()
$by.self
                  self.time self.pct total.time total.pct
"na.replace"           5.10    49.71       6.62     64.52
"[.data.table"         2.48    24.17       9.86     96.10
"is.na"                1.52    14.81       1.52     14.81
"gc"                   0.22     2.14       0.22      2.14
"unique"               0.14     1.36       0.16      1.56
... snip ...

There, I would focus on na.replace and is.na, where there are a few vector copies and vector scans. Those can fairly easily be eliminated by writing a small na.replace C function that updates NA by reference in the vector. That would at least halve the 20 seconds I think. Does such a function exist in any R package?

The reason f_andrie fails may be because it copies the whole of dt1, or creates a logical matrix as big as the whole of dt1, a few times. The other 2 methods work on one column at a time (although I only briefly looked at NAToUnknown).

EDIT (more elegant solution as requested by Ramnath in comments) :

f_dowle2 = function(DT) {
  for (i in names(DT))
    DT[is.na(get(i)), (i):=0]
}

system.time(f_dowle2(dt1))
  user  system elapsed 
 6.468   0.760   7.250   # faster, too

identical(a_gdata, dt1)   
[1] TRUE

I wish I did it that way to start with!

EDIT2 (over 1 year later, now)

There is also set(). This can be faster if there are a lot of column being looped through, as it avoids the (small) overhead of calling [,:=,] in a loop. set is a loopable :=. See ?set.

f_dowle3 = function(DT) {
  # either of the following for loops

  # by name :
  for (j in names(DT))
    set(DT,which(is.na(DT[[j]])),j,0)

  # or by number (slightly faster than by name) :
  for (j in seq_len(ncol(DT)))
    set(DT,which(is.na(DT[[j]])),j,0)
}

Answer 2

My understanding is that the secret to fast operations in R is to utilise vector (or arrays, which are vectors under the hood.)

In this solution I make use of a data.matrix which is an array but behave a bit like a data.frame. Because it is an array, you can use a very simple vector substitution to replace the NAs:

A little helper function to remove the NAs. The essence is a single line of code. I only do this to measure execution time.

remove_na <- function(x){
  dm <- data.matrix(x)
  dm[is.na(dm)] <- 0
  data.table(dm)
}

A little helper function to create a data.table of a given size.

create_dt <- function(nrow=5, ncol=5, propNA = 0.5){
  v <- runif(nrow * ncol)
  v[sample(seq_len(nrow*ncol), propNA * nrow*ncol)] <- NA
  data.table(matrix(v, ncol=ncol))
}

Demonstration on a tiny sample:

library(data.table)
set.seed(1)
dt <- create_dt(5, 5, 0.5)

dt
            V1        V2        V3        V4        V5
[1,]        NA 0.8983897        NA 0.4976992 0.9347052
[2,] 0.3721239 0.9446753        NA 0.7176185 0.2121425
[3,] 0.5728534        NA 0.6870228 0.9919061        NA
[4,]        NA        NA        NA        NA 0.1255551
[5,] 0.2016819        NA 0.7698414        NA        NA

remove_na(dt)
            V1        V2        V3        V4        V5
[1,] 0.0000000 0.8983897 0.0000000 0.4976992 0.9347052
[2,] 0.3721239 0.9446753 0.0000000 0.7176185 0.2121425
[3,] 0.5728534 0.0000000 0.6870228 0.9919061 0.0000000
[4,] 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.1255551
[5,] 0.2016819 0.0000000 0.7698414 0.0000000 0.0000000

Answer 3

Here's the simplest one I could come up with:

dt[is.na(dt)] <- 0

It's efficient and no need to write functions and other glue code.

Answer 4

> DT = data.table(a=LETTERS[c(1,1:3,4:7)],b=sample(c(15,51,NA,12,21),8,T),key="a")
> DT
   a  b
1: A 12
2: A NA
3: B 15
4: C NA
5: D 51
6: E NA
7: F 15
8: G 51
> DT[is.na(b),b:=0]
> DT
   a  b
1: A 12
2: A  0
3: B 15
4: C  0
5: D 51
6: E  0
7: F 15
8: G 51
> 

Answer 5

For the sake of completeness, another way to replace NAs with 0 is to use

f_rep <- function(dt) {
dt[is.na(dt)] <- 0
return(dt)
}

To compare results and times I have incorporated all approaches mentioned so far.

set.seed(1)
dt1 <- create_dt(2e5, 200, 0.1)
dt2 <- dt1
dt3 <- dt1

system.time(res1 <- f_gdata(dt1))
   User      System verstrichen 
   3.62        0.22        3.84 
system.time(res2 <- f_andrie(dt1))
   User      System verstrichen 
   2.95        0.33        3.28 
system.time(f_dowle2(dt2))
   User      System verstrichen 
   0.78        0.00        0.78 
system.time(f_dowle3(dt3))
   User      System verstrichen 
   0.17        0.00        0.17 
system.time(res3 <- f_unknown(dt1))
   User      System verstrichen 
   6.71        0.84        7.55 
system.time(res4 <- f_rep(dt1))
   User      System verstrichen 
   0.32        0.00        0.32 

identical(res1, res2) & identical(res2, res3) & identical(res3, res4) & identical(res4, dt2) & identical(dt2, dt3)
[1] TRUE

So the new approach is slightly slower than f_dowle3 but faster than all the other approaches. But to be honest, this is against my Intuition of the data.table Syntax and I have no idea why this works. Can anybody enlighten me?

Answer 6

Here is a solution using NAToUnknown in the gdata package. I have used Andrie's solution to create a huge data table and also included time comparisons with Andrie's solution.

# CREATE DATA TABLE
dt1 = create_dt(2e5, 200, 0.1)

# FUNCTIONS TO SET NA TO ZERO   
f_gdata  = function(dt, un = 0) gdata::NAToUnknown(dt, un)
f_Andrie = function(dt) remove_na(dt)

# COMPARE SOLUTIONS AND TIMES
system.time(a_gdata  <- f_gdata(dt1))

user  system elapsed 
4.224   2.962   7.388 

system.time(a_andrie <- f_Andrie(dt1))

 user  system elapsed 
4.635   4.730  20.060 

identical(a_gdata, g_andrie)  

TRUE