Speed Test: Sapply vs. Vectorization
The apply functions in R are awesome (see this post for some lesser known apply functions). However, if you can use pure vectorization, then you'll probably end up making your code run a lot faster than just depending upon functions like sapply and lapply. This is because apply functions like these still rely on looping through elements in a vector or list behind the scenes - one at a time. Vectorization, on the other hand, allows parallel operations under the hood - allowing much faster computation. This posts runs through a couple such examples involving string substitution and fuzzy matching. String substitution For example, let's create a vector that looks like this: test1, test2, test3, test4, ..., test1000000 with one million elements. With sapply, the code to create this would…
