Functional Programming in R

What is functional programming?
Functional programming in R
Wrap-up
Functional Programming in R
David Springate
@datajujitsu
David Springate Functional Programming in R

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Outline
1 What is functional programming?
2 Elements of functional programming
3 Functional Programming in R
4 A Functional-style generic bootstrap
5 Wrap-up and further reading

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Programming metaphysics
Programs are representations of reality in a computer
There are diﬀerent ways to represent reality. . .

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OOP / imperative metaphysics
C, Python, Java etc.
Everything is an object with state and behaviour
A river is an object with
various attributes bound
to it:
Flow rate
Depth
Pollution levels
Salinity

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Functional Metaphysics
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s
not the same river and he’s not the same man. -
Heraclitus
Lisp, Haskell, F#, Clojure etc.
Things are collections of ﬁxed values which
go through processes (functions) over time

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Elements of Functional Programming
1 Functions as ﬁrst class citizens
2 Vectorised / declarative expressions
3 “Pure” functions - No side eﬀects
4 Anonymous functions
5 Immutability
6 Recursion

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R Genealogy
S
Scheme

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R is a strongly functional language
. . . everything is a function call!
> 1 + 2
## [1] 3
. . . is the same as. . .
> ‘+‘(1, 2)
## [1] 3

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R is a strongly functional language
. . . everything is a function call!
> 1:10
## [1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
. . . is the same as. . .
> ‘:‘(1, 10)
## [1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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Vectorised functions
Are functions that operate on vectors/matrices/dataframes as well
as on single numbers
Often much faster than looping over a vector
Higher level - less to debug!
Very deep in the language

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Get all even numbers up to 200000
> # C style vector allocation:
> x <- c()
> for(i in 1:200000){
+ if(i %% 2 == 0){
+ x <- c(x, i)
+ }
+ }
## user system elapsed
## 9.86 0.00 9.88

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Get all even numbers up to 200000
> # FP style vectorised operation
> a <- 1:200000
> x <- a[a %% 2 == 0]
## user system elapsed
## 0.01 0.00 0.01

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Most built-in functions are vectorised:
> # e.g.
> paste()
> colMeans()
> rowSums()
> log()
> sqrt()
> x > y
> is.na()
> ifelse()
> rnorm() # etc. etc.

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Higher-order functions
. . . Are functions that operate on all elements of a collection
(vector/list/vector/matrix/dataframe)
Function to be applied to each element in turn
In[1] In[2] In[3] In[5]In[4]
Out[1] Out[2] Out[3] Out[5]Out[4]
Input
collection
Output
collection

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You just need to think about what goes in and what you want to
come out:
lapply : Any collection -> FUNCTION -> list

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come out:
sapply : Any collection -> FUNCTION -> matrix/vector

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come out:
apply : Matrix/dataframe + margin -> FUNCTION ->
matrix/vector

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come out:
apply : Matrix/dataframe + margin -> FUNCTION ->
matrix/vector
Reduce : Any collection -> FUNCTION -> single element

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Closures
An object is data with functions. A closure is a function with data.
- John D Cook
Function data1
Returns
New function
enclosing data
data
data2
Arguments to function
data2
Can build functions that
return new functions:
Useful if some work
only needs to be done
once, when the
function is generated
Great for optimisation
and randomisation
problems

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An FP-style Bootstrapping function
A Generic function to sample linear models with replacement
Illustrates:
Functions returning new functions
Anonymous functions
Will test using the iris data: data(iris)
c.f. a non-FP version of the same function

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boot_lm <- function(formula, data, ...){
function(){
lm(formula=formula,
data=data[sample(nrow(data), replace=TRUE),], ...)
}
}
iris_boot <- boot_lm(Sepal.Length ~ Petal.Length, iris)
bstrap <- sapply(X=1:1000,
FUN=function(x) iris_boot()$coef)

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apply(bstrap, MARGIN=1, FUN=quantile,
probs=c(0.025, 0.5, 0.975))
## (Intercept) Petal.Length
## 2.5% 4.155 0.3696
## 50% 4.314 0.4072
## 97.5% 4.458 0.4455

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A Non-FP-style Bootstrapping function
boot_lm_nf <- function(d, form, iters, output, ...){
for(i in 1:iters){
x <- lm(formula=form,
data=d[sample(nrow(d),
replace = TRUE),], ...)[[output]]
if(i == 1){
bootstrap <- matrix(data=NA, nrow=iters,
ncol=length(x),
dimnames=list(NULL,names(x)))
bootstrap[i,] <- x
} else bootstrap[i,] <- x
}
bootstrap
}

Wrap-up
A Non-FP-style Bootstrapping function
bstrap2 <- boot_lm_nf(d=iris,
form=Sepal.Length ~ Petal.Length,
iters=1000, output="coefficients")
CIs <- c(0.025, 0.5, 0.975)
cbind( "(Intercept)"=quantile(bstrap2[,1],probs = CIs),
"Petal.Length"=quantile(bstrap2[,2],probs = CIs))
## (Intercept) Petal.Length
## 2.5% 4.167 0.3711
## 50% 4.309 0.4093
## 97.5% 4.447 0.4460

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Wrap-up

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Advantages of Functional Programming
Functional programming in R is
More concise
Often faster
Easier to read and debug
More elegant
Higher level
Truer to the language!
. . . than non-fp

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Further reading
Functional Programming
mitpress.mit.edu/sicp
github.com/hadley/devtools/wiki
www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
Vectorisation
Programming language metaphysics
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/
Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hickey

Wrap-up
Thank you
github.com/DASpringate
linkedin.com/in/daspringate/
@datajujitsu
daspringate@gmail
. . . Any questions?

Functional Programming in R

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