Column-Linked and Row-Linked Matrices

A class that links matrix-like objects (nodes) by rows or by columns while behaving similarly to a base R matrix. Very large matrices are supported if the nodes are file-backed matrices.

LinkedMatrix

LinkedMatrix is an R package that provides matrices implemented as lists of matrix-like nodes, linked by columns or rows.

It was originally developed for the BGData package to address the array size limit of ff (length must be between 1 and .Machine$integer.max) by chaining multiple ff objects together.

This package is deliberately kept simple. For computational methods that use LinkedMatrix check out the BGData package.

Example

The following code generates three different matrix-like objects and links them together by rows in a RowLinkedMatrix. The LinkedMatrix instance can then be treated like any other regular matrix.

library(LinkedMatrix)

m1 <- ff::ff(initdata = rnorm(50), dim = c(5, 10))
m2 <- bigmemory::big.matrix(init = rnorm(50), nrow = 5, ncol = 10)
m3 <- matrix(data = rnorm(50), nrow = 5, ncol = 10)
m <- RowLinkedMatrix(m1, m2, m3)

dim(m)
m[1, ]
m[, 1]

Installation

Install the stable version from CRAN:

install.packages("LinkedMatrix")

Alternatively, install the development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("QuantGen/LinkedMatrix")

Documentation

Further documentation can be found on RDocumentation.

Contributing

• Issue Tracker: https://github.com/QuantGen/LinkedMatrix/issues
• Source Code: https://github.com/QuantGen/LinkedMatrix