Answering to Ben ( functions comparison in R)

Following the post about %in% operator, I received this tweet:

@AndreaCirilloAC check out the dplyr #rstats package. Easy to use the %in% operator with the filter() function. https://t.co/6oC0YkvUI7

— Ben White (@benwhite21) September 12, 2014

I gave a look to the code kindly provided by Ben and then I asked myself:
I know dplyr is a really nice package,  but which snippet is faster?

to answer the question I’ve put the two snippets in two functions:

#Ben snippet
dplyr_snippet =function(object,column,vector){
filter(object,object[,column] %in% vector)
}
#AC snippet
Rbase_snippet =function(object,column,vector){
object[object[,column] %in% vector,]
}

Then, thanks to the great package microbenchmark, I made a comparison between those two functions, testing the time of execution of both, for 100.000 times.

comparison = microbenchmark(Rbase_snippet(iris,5,vec),dplyr_snippet(iris,5,vec),times = 100000)

#plot the output
autoplot(comparison)+
labs(title = "comparison between dplyr_snippet and Rbase_snippet", y="snippet")


And that was the result:

 

R Base package seems to be the winner, even if just for an handful of microseconds…

Nevertheless, I am really grateful to Ben, it was a great fun!

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