Scala for Data Science [book review]

This post will review the book:

• Scala for Data Science, Bugnion, Packt, 2016.

Disclaimer: This book review has not been solicited by the publisher (or anyone else) in any way. I purchased the review copy of this book myself. I have not received any benefit from the writing of this review.

Introduction

On this blog I previously reviewed the (terrible) book, Scala for machine learning by the same publisher. I was therefore rather wary of buying this book. But the topic coverage looked good, so I decided to buy it, and wasn’t disappointed. Scala for Data Science is my top recommendation for getting started with statistical computing and data science applications using Scala.

Overview

The book assumes a basic familiarity with programming in Scala, at around the level of someone who has completed the Functional Programming Principles in Scala Coursera course. That is, it (quite sensibly) doesn’t attempt to teach the reader how to program in Scala, but rather how to approach the development of data science applications using Scala. It introduces more advanced Scala idioms gradually (eg. typeclasses don’t appear until Chapter 5), so it is relatively approachable for those who aren’t yet Scala experts. The book does cover Apache Spark, but Spark isn’t introduced until Chapter 10, so it isn’t “just another Spark book”. Most of the book is about developing data science applications in Scala, completely independently of Spark. That said, it also provides one of the better introductions to Spark, so doubles up as a pretty good introductory Spark book, in addition to being a good introduction to the development of data science applications with Scala. It should probably be emphasised that the book is very much focused on data science, rather than statistical computing, but there is plenty of material of relevance to those who are more interested in statistical computing than applied data science.

Chapter by chapter

1. Scala and Data Science – motivation for using Scala in preference to certain other languages I could mention…
2. Manipulating data with Breeze – Breeze is the standard Scala library for scientific and statistical computing. It’s pretty good, but documentation is rather lacking. This Chapter provides a good tutorial introduction to Breeze, which should be enough to get people going sufficiently to be able to make some sense of the available on-line documentation.
3. Plotting with breeze-viz – Breeze has some support for plotting and visualisation of data. It’s somewhat limited when compared to what is available in R, but is fine for interactive exploratory analysis. However, the available on-line documentation for breeze-viz is almost non-existent. This Chapter is the best introduction to breeze-viz that I have seen.
4. Parallel collections and futures – the Scala standard library has built-in support for parallel and concurrent programming based on functional programming concepts such as parallel (monadic) collections and Futures. Again, this Chapter provides an excellent introduction to these powerful concepts, allowing the reader to start developing parallel algorithms for multi-core hardware with minimal fuss.
5. Scala and SQL through JDBC – this Chapter looks at connecting to databases using standard JVM mechanisms such as JDBC. However, it gradually introduces more functional ways of interfacing with databases using typeclasses, motivating:
6. Slick – a functional interface for SQL – an introduction to the Slick library for a more Scala-esque way of database interfacing.
7. Web APIs – the practicalities of talking to web APIs. eg. authenticated HTTP requests and parsing of JSON responses.
8. Scala and MongoDB – working with a NoSQL database from Scala
9. Concurrency with Akka – Akka is the canonical implementation of the actor model in Scala, for building large concurrent applications. It is the foundation on which Spark is built.
10. Distributed batch processing with Spark – a tutorial introduction to Apache Spark. Spark is a big data analytics framework built on top of Scala and Akka. It is arguably the best available framework for big data analytics on computing clusters in the cloud, and hence there is a lot of interest in it. Indeed, Spark is driving some of the interest in Scala.
11. Spark SQL and DataFrames – interfacing with databases using Spark, and more importantly, an introduction to Spark’s DataFrame abstraction, which is now fundamental to developing machine learning pipelines in Spark.
12. Distributed machine learning with MLLib – MLLib is the machine learning library for Spark. It is worth emphasising that unlike many early books on Spark, this chapter covers the newer DataFrame-based pipeline API, in addition to the original RDD-based API. Together, Chapters 10, 11 and 12 provide a pretty good tutorial introduction to Spark. After working through these, it should be easy to engage with the official on-line Spark documentation.
13. Web APIs with Play – is concerned with developing a web API at the end of a data science pipeline.
14. Visualisation with D3 and the Play framework – is concerned with integrating visualisation into a data science web application.

Summary

This book provides a good tutorial introduction to a large number of topics relevant to statisticians and data scientists interested in developing data science applications using Scala. After working through this book, readers should be well-placed to augment their knowledge with readily searchable on-line documentation.

In a follow-up post I will give a quick overview of some other books relevant to getting started with Scala for statistical computing and data science.

Faster Gibbs sampling MCMC from within R

Introduction

This post follows on from the previous post on Gibbs sampling in various languages. In that post a simple Gibbs sampler was implemented in various languages, and speeds were compared. It was seen that R is very slow for iterative simulation algorithms characteristic of MCMC methods such as the Gibbs sampler. Statically typed languages such as C/C++ and Java were seen to be fastest for this type of algorithm. Since many statisticians like to use R for most of their work, there is natural interest in the possibility of extending R by calling simulation algorithms written in other languages. It turns out to be straightforward to call C, C++ and Java from within R, so this post will look at how this can be done, and exactly how fast the different options turn out to be. The post draws heavily on my previous posts on calling C from R and calling Java from R, as well as Dirk Eddelbuettel’s post on calling C++ from R, and it may be helpful to consult these posts for further details.

Languages

R

We will start with the simple pure R version of the Gibbs sampler, and use this as our point of reference for understanding the benefits of re-coding in other languages. The background to the problem was given in the previous post and so won’t be repeated here. The code can be given as follows:

gibbs<-function(N=50000,thin=1000)
{
	mat=matrix(0,ncol=2,nrow=N)
	x=0
	y=0
	for (i in 1:N) {
		for (j in 1:thin) {
			x=rgamma(1,3,y*y+4)
			y=rnorm(1,1/(x+1),1/sqrt(2*x+2))
		}
		mat[i,]=c(x,y)
	}
	names(mat)=c("x","y")
	mat
}

This code works perfectly, but is very slow. It takes 458.9 seconds on my very fast laptop (details given in previous post).

C

Let us now see how we can introduce a new function, gibbsC into R, which works in exactly the same way as gibbs, but actually calls on compiled C code to do all of the work. First we need the C code in a file called gibbs.c:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <R.h>
#include <Rmath.h>

void gibbs(int *Np,int *thinp,double *xvec,double *yvec)
{
  int i,j;
  int N=*Np,thin=*thinp;
  GetRNGstate();
  double x=0;
  double y=0;
  for (i=0;i<N;i++) {
    for (j=0;j<thin;j++) {
      x=rgamma(3.0,1.0/(y*y+4));
      y=rnorm(1.0/(x+1),1.0/sqrt(2*x+2));
    }
    xvec[i]=x; yvec[i]=y;
  }
  PutRNGstate();
}

This can be compiled with R CMD SHLIB gibbs.c. We can load it into R and wrap it up so that it is easy to use with the following code:

dyn.load(file.path(".",paste("gibbs",.Platform$dynlib.ext,sep="")))
gibbsC<-function(n=50000,thin=1000)
{
  tmp=.C("gibbs",as.integer(n),as.integer(thin),
                x=as.double(1:n),y=as.double(1:n))
  mat=cbind(tmp$x,tmp$y)
  colnames(mat)=c("x","y")
  mat
}

The new function gibbsC works just like gibbs, but takes just 12.1 seconds to run. This is roughly 40 times faster than the pure R version, which is a big deal.

Note that using the R inline package, it is possible to directly inline the C code into the R source code. We can do this with the following R code:

require(inline)
code='
  int i,j;
  int N=*Np,thin=*thinp;
  GetRNGstate();
  double x=0;
  double y=0;
  for (i=0;i<N;i++) {
    for (j=0;j<thin;j++) {
      x=rgamma(3.0,1.0/(y*y+4));
      y=rnorm(1.0/(x+1),1.0/sqrt(2*x+2));
    }
    xvec[i]=x; yvec[i]=y;
  }
  PutRNGstate();'
gibbsCin<-cfunction(sig=signature(Np="integer",thinp="integer",xvec="numeric",yvec="numeric"),body=code,includes="#include <Rmath.h>",language="C",convention=".C")
gibbsCinline<-function(n=50000,thin=1000)
{
  tmp=gibbsCin(n,thin,rep(0,n),rep(0,n))
  mat=cbind(tmp$x,tmp$y)
  colnames(mat)=c("x","y")
  mat
}

This runs at the same speed as the code compiled separately, and is arguably a bit cleaner in this case. Personally I’m not a big fan of inlining code unless it is something really very simple. If there is one thing that we have learned from the murky world of web development, it is that little good comes from mixing up different languages in the same source code file!

C++

We can also inline C++ code into R using the inline and Rcpp packages. The code below originates from Sanjog Misra, and was discussed in the post by Dirk Eddelbuettel mentioned at the start of this post.

require(Rcpp)
require(inline)

gibbscode = '
int N = as<int>(n);
int thn = as<int>(thin);
int i,j;
RNGScope scope;
NumericVector xs(N),ys(N);
double x=0;
double y=0;
for (i=0;i<N;i++) {
  for (j=0;j<thn;j++) {
    x = ::Rf_rgamma(3.0,1.0/(y*y+4));
    y= ::Rf_rnorm(1.0/(x+1),1.0/sqrt(2*x+2));
  }
  xs(i) = x;
  ys(i) = y;
}
return Rcpp::DataFrame::create( Named("x")= xs, Named("y") = ys);
'

RcppGibbsFn <- cxxfunction( signature(n="int", thin = "int"),
                              gibbscode, plugin="Rcpp")

RcppGibbs <- function(N=50000,thin=1000)
{
	RcppGibbsFn(N,thin)
}

This version of the sampler runs in 12.4 seconds, just a little bit slower than the C version.

Java

It is also quite straightforward to call Java code from within R using the rJava package. The following code

import java.util.*;
import cern.jet.random.tdouble.*;
import cern.jet.random.tdouble.engine.*;

class GibbsR
{

    public static double[][] gibbs(int N,int thin,int seed)
    {
	DoubleRandomEngine rngEngine=new DoubleMersenneTwister(seed);
	Normal rngN=new Normal(0.0,1.0,rngEngine);
	Gamma rngG=new Gamma(1.0,1.0,rngEngine);
	double x=0,y=0;
	double[][] mat=new double[2][N];
	for (int i=0;i<N;i++) {
	    for (int j=0;j<thin;j++) {
		x=rngG.nextDouble(3.0,y*y+4);
		y=rngN.nextDouble(1.0/(x+1),1.0/Math.sqrt(2*x+2));
	    }
	    mat[0][i]=x; mat[1][i]=y;
	}
	return mat;
    }

}

can be compiled with javac GibbsR.java (assuming that Parallel COLT is in the classpath), and wrapped up from within an R session with

library(rJava)
.jinit()
obj=.jnew("GibbsR")

gibbsJ<-function(N=50000,thin=1000,seed=trunc(runif(1)*1e6))
{
    result=.jcall(obj,"[[D","gibbs",as.integer(N),as.integer(thin),as.integer(seed))
    mat=sapply(result,.jevalArray)
    colnames(mat)=c("x","y")
    mat
}

This code runs in 10.7 seconds. Yes, that’s correct. Yes, the Java code is faster than both the C and C++ code! This really goes to show that Java is now an excellent option for numerically intensive work such as this. However, before any C/C++ enthusiasts go apoplectic, I should explain why Java turns out to be faster here, as the comparison is not quite fair… In the C and C++ code, use was made of the internal R random number generation routines, which are relatively slow compared to many modern numerical library implementations. In the Java code, I used Parallel COLT for random number generation, as it isn’t straightforward to call the R generators from Java code. It turns out that the COLT generators are faster than the R generators, and that is why Java turns out to be faster here…

C+GSL

Of course we do not have to use the R random number generators within our C code. For example, we could instead call on the GSL generators, using the following code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_rng.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_randist.h>
#include <R.h>

void gibbsGSL(int *Np,int *thinp,int *seedp,double *xvec,double *yvec)
{
  int i,j;
  int N=*Np,thin=*thinp,seed=*seedp;
  gsl_rng *r = gsl_rng_alloc(gsl_rng_mt19937);
  gsl_rng_set(r,seed);
  double x=0;
  double y=0;
  for (i=0;i<N;i++) {
    for (j=0;j<thin;j++) {
      x=gsl_ran_gamma(r,3.0,1.0/(y*y+4));
      y=1.0/(x+1)+gsl_ran_gaussian(r,1.0/sqrt(2*x+2));
    }
    xvec[i]=x; yvec[i]=y;
  }
}

It can be compiled with R CMD SHLIB -lgsl -lgslcblas gibbsGSL.c, and then called as for the regular C version. This runs in 8.0 seconds, which is noticeably faster than the Java code, but probably not “enough” faster to make it an important factor to consider in language choice.

Summary

In this post I’ve shown that it is relatively straightforward to call code written in C, C++ or Java from within R, and that this can give very significant performance gains relative to pure R code. All of the options give fairly similar performance gains. I showed that in the case of this particular example, the “obvious” Java code is actually slightly faster than the “obvious” C or C++ code, and explained why, and how to make the C version slightly faster by using the GSL. The post by Dirk shows how to call the GSL generators from the C++ version, which I haven’t replicated here.

Calling Java code from R

Introduction

In the previous post I looked at some simple methods for calling C code from R using a simple Gibbs sampler as the motivating example. In this post we will look again at the same Gibbs sampler, but now implemented in Java, and look at a couple of options for calling that code from an R session.

Stand-alone Java code

Below is some Java code for implementing the bivariate Gibbs sampler discussed previously. It relies on Parallel COLT, which must be installed and in the Java CLASSPATH in order to follow the examples.

import java.util.*;
import cern.jet.random.tdouble.*;
import cern.jet.random.tdouble.engine.*;

class Gibbs
{

    public static void main(String[] arg)
    {
	if (arg.length != 3) {
            System.err.println("Usage: java Gibbs <Iters> <Thin> <Seed>");
            System.exit(1);  
        }
	int N=Integer.parseInt(arg[0]);
	int thin=Integer.parseInt(arg[1]);
	int seed=Integer.parseInt(arg[2]);
	DoubleRandomEngine rngEngine=new DoubleMersenneTwister(seed);
	Normal rngN=new Normal(0.0,1.0,rngEngine);
	Gamma rngG=new Gamma(1.0,1.0,rngEngine);
	double x=0,y=0;
	System.out.println("Iter x y");
	for (int i=0;i<N;i++) {
	    for (int j=0;j<thin;j++) {
		x=rngG.nextDouble(3.0,y*y+4);
		y=rngN.nextDouble(1.0/(x+1),1.0/Math.sqrt(x+1));
	    }
	    System.out.println(i+" "+x+" "+y);
	}
    }

}

It can be compiled and run stand-alone from an OS shell with the following commands:

javac Gibbs.java
java Gibbs 10 1000 1

As discussed in the previous post, it is possible to call any command-line program from inside an R session using the system() command. A small wrapper function for conveniently running this code from within R can be written as follows.

gibbs<-function(N=10000,thin=500,
             seed=trunc(runif(1)*1e6),
             exec="Gibbs",
             tmpfile=tempfile())
{
  command=paste("java",exec,N,thin,seed,">",tmpfile)
  system(command)
  read.table(tmpfile,header=TRUE)
}

This can then be run from within an R session with a simple call to gibbs(). Note that a random seed is being generated within R to be passed to the Java code to be used to seed the COLT random number generator used within the Java code. As previously discussed, for many long running codes, this approach can be quite effective, and is clearly very simple. However, there is an overhead associated with the system() call, and also with writing output to disk and then reading it back again.

Using rJava

It is possible to avoid the overheads associated with the above approach by directly calling the Java code from R and having the return values returned directly into the R session from memory. There isn’t really direct support for this within the core R language, but there are couple of different solutions provided by R packages. The simplest and most popular approach seems to be the rJava package. This package can be installed with a simple

install.packages("rJava")

This should “just work” on some OSs (eg. Windows), but may fail on other OSs if R is not aware of the local Java environment. If the installation fails, check the error message carefully for advice/instructions. On most Linux systems, the problem can be fixed by quitting R, then running the following command from the shell

sudo R CMD javareconf

before re-starting R and re-attempting the installation. rJava provides a mechanism for starting a JVM within the running R session, creating objects, calling methods and having method return values returned to R. It is actually much more flexible than the .C() function for C code discussed in the previous post.

In order to use this package for our example, we must first re-factor the code slightly in the following way.

import java.util.*;
import cern.jet.random.tdouble.*;
import cern.jet.random.tdouble.engine.*;

class GibbsR
{

    public static void main(String[] arg)
    {
	if (arg.length != 3) {
            System.err.println("Usage: java GibbsR <Iters> <Thin> <Seed>");
            System.exit(1);  
        }
	int N=Integer.parseInt(arg[0]);
	int thin=Integer.parseInt(arg[1]);
	int seed=Integer.parseInt(arg[2]);
	double[][] mat=gibbs(N,thin,seed);
	System.out.println("Iter x y");
	for (int i=0;i<N;i++) {
	    System.out.println(""+i+" "+mat[0][i]+" "+mat[1][i]);
	}	
    }

    public static double[][] gibbs(int N,int thin,int seed)
    {
	DoubleRandomEngine rngEngine=new DoubleMersenneTwister(seed);
	Normal rngN=new Normal(0.0,1.0,rngEngine);
	Gamma rngG=new Gamma(1.0,1.0,rngEngine);
	double x=0,y=0;
	double[][] mat=new double[2][N];
	for (int i=0;i<N;i++) {
	    for (int j=0;j<thin;j++) {
		x=rngG.nextDouble(3.0,y*y+4);
		y=rngN.nextDouble(1.0/(x+1),1.0/Math.sqrt(x+1));
	    }
	    mat[0][i]=x; mat[1][i]=y;
	}
	return mat;
    }

}

This code can be compiled and run from the command-line just as the previous code could.

javac GibbsR.java
java GibbsR 10 1000 1

However, we have now separated out the code we want to be able to call from R into a static method called gibbs, which runs the Gibbs sampler and stores the result in a 2-dimensional array which is its return value. We can now see how to call this code from within a running R session. We first need to set up the R environment ready to call the code.

library(rJava)
.jinit()
obj=.jnew("GibbsR")

Line 1 loads the package, line 2 starts up the JVM, and line 3 creates a link to the the GibbsR class (in general this is used to create a new Java object of the given type, but here we are using static methods). Java methods are called on Java objects using .jcall(). We can write a simple R function to conveniently call the method as follows.

jgibbs<-function(N=10000,thin=500,seed=trunc(runif(1)*1e6))
{
    result=.jcall(obj,"[[D","gibbs",as.integer(N),as.integer(thin),as.integer(seed))
    mat=sapply(result,.jevalArray)
    mat=cbind(1:N,mat)
    colnames(mat)=c("Iter","x","y")
    mat
}

This can now be called with a simple jgibbs(). The first line of the function body carries out the actual method call. The return type of the method must be explicitly declared – “[[D” means a 2-dimensional array of doubles, using JNI notation. Care must also be taken to coerce the method parameters into the correct type that the Java method expects to receive. .jcall() is generally quite good at unpacking basic Java types into corresponding R types. However, the two dimensional array is here returned as an R list consisting of one-dimensional Java array objects. The unpacking is completed using the subsequent call to jevalArray() using sapply(), before the resulting matrix is tidied up and returned to the R session.

Summary and further reading

We have looked at a couple of very simple methods for calling Java code from an R session. The rJava package is a very flexible mechanism for integrating Java code into R.

I haven’t found a lot of tutorial-level material on the web for the rJava package. However, the package itself has very good documentation associated with it. Start with the information on the rJava home page. From an R session with the rJava package loaded, help(package="rJava") lists the available functions, all of which have associated documentation. ?.jinit, ?.jnew, ?.jcall and ?.jevalArray provide further background and information on the example covered here.

After that, the source code of R packages which use rJava are a useful source of further inspiration – look at the reverse-depends list for rJava in CRAN. In particular, the helloJavaWorld package is a tutorial for how to include Java code in an R package (read the associated vignette).

Calling C code from R

Introduction

In this post I’ll look at how to call compiled C code from an R session. The focus here is on calling C code from R, rather than on extending R using C. Although the two are technically very similar problems, the emphasis is somewhat different. A lot of existing documentation focuses on the latter problem, and this is one of the motivations for writing this post. Fortunately, the problem of calling existing C code from R is a bit simpler than the more general problem of extending R in C.

In a previous post I looked at how to implement a trivial bivariate Gibbs sampler in various languages. It was seen there that the C version ran approximately 60 times faster than the R version. It is therefore often desirable to code up MCMC algorithms in C. However, it is usually very convenient to be able to call such algorithms from inside an R session. There are various ways to do this, ranging from the trivial to very complex. In this post I will look at some of the simpler methods and discuss the pros and cons.

Standalone C code

We will restrict attention to the Gibbs sampler discussed in a previous post. We will focus on the C version of the code. Below is a slightly modified version of the code which includes some command-line arguments that enable some flexibility in how the code is run post-compilation.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_rng.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_randist.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
  if (argc!=4) {
    fprintf(stderr,"Usage: %s <Iters> <Thin> <Seed>\n",argv[0]);
    exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
  }
  long N=(long) atoi(argv[1]);
  long thin=(long) atoi(argv[2]);
  long seed=(long) atoi(argv[3]);
  long i,j;
  gsl_rng *r = gsl_rng_alloc(gsl_rng_mt19937);
  gsl_rng_set(r,seed);
  double x=0;
  double y=0;
  printf("Iter x y\n");
  for (i=0;i<N;i++) {
    for (j=0;j<thin;j++) {
      x=gsl_ran_gamma(r,3.0,1.0/(y*y+4));
      y=1.0/(x+1)+gsl_ran_gaussian(r,1.0/sqrt(x+1));
    }
    printf("%ld %f %f\n",i,x,y);
  }
  exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}

Assuming a Unix/Linux environment (including a GSL implementation), the above code can be compiled from the Unix shell with a command like:

gcc -O2 -lgsl -lgslcblas standalone.c -o standalone

and run with a command like:

./standalone 10000 500 1 > data.tab

The first command-line argument is the number of iterations required, and the second is the “thin” to be applied to the output. The third argument is the “seed” to be applied to the GSL random number generator (RNG). This allows different (not quite independent – see my post on parallel MCMC for details) runs to be obtained by selecting different seed values. The simplest way to call this code from within an R session is to call this unmodified executable using the R system() command. A small “wrapper” function to do this is given below.

standalone<-function(N=10000,thin=500,
             seed=trunc(runif(1)*1e6),
             exec=file.path(".","standalone"),
             tmpfile=tempfile())
{
  command=paste(exec,N,thin,seed,">",tmpfile)
  system(command)
  read.table(tmpfile,header=TRUE)
}

Note the use of the file.path() and tempfile() R functions in a (probably vain!) attempt to make the code somewhat portable. Just running standalone() from an R session should then return a data frame containing the MCMC output. I gave some commands for analysing this output in a previous post. This approach to calling external code is very simple and crude, and quite generic (it is not specific to C code at all). However, it is very quick and easy to implement, and in many cases quite efficient. There is a considerable computational overhead in executing the system command and parsing output files from disk. However, if the code being called is very computationally intensive and relatively slow (as is typically the case), then this overhead can often be negligible, rendering this approach quite practical.

Building and linking to a shared library

If one is really keen to avoid the overhead of executing an R system command, then it is necessary to compile the required C code into a shared library (or DLL), and link this code into R where it can be called directly via R’s foreign language interface. Below is a version of the previous C code modified to make it appropriate for calling from R.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_rng.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_randist.h>
#include <R.h>

void gibbs(int *Np,int *thinp,int *seedp,double *xvec,double *yvec)
{
  int i,j;
  int N=*Np,thin=*thinp,seed=*seedp;
  gsl_rng *r = gsl_rng_alloc(gsl_rng_mt19937);
  gsl_rng_set(r,seed);
  double x=0;
  double y=0;
  for (i=0;i<N;i++) {
    for (j=0;j<thin;j++) {
      x=gsl_ran_gamma(r,3.0,1.0/(y*y+4));
      y=1.0/(x+1)+gsl_ran_gaussian(r,1.0/sqrt(x+1));
    }
    xvec[i]=x; yvec[i]=y;
  }
}

Note that it is only possible to pass pointers from simple R/C data types, and so all function arguments must be pointers. Also note that there is no return value to the function, and that values are retrieved in R by modifying some of the values pointed to by the pointer arguments. This is the mode of operation imposed by the basic method that R provides for calling C code from R (the .C() function). Note that there are other methods for extending R in C, using the .Call() and .External() functions, but these are beyond the scope of this post. Again assuming a Unix/Linux environment, this code can be compiled into a shared library with a command like:

R CMD SHLIB -lgsl -lgslcblas dynamic.c

It can then be loaded into a running R session with a command like dyn.load("dynamic.so"). Again, if we are attempting to write portable code, we might use a command like:

dyn.load(file.path(".",paste("dynamic",.Platform$dynlib.ext,sep="")))

You can check what dynamic libraries are loaded into the current R session with getLoadedDLLs(). Once the DLL (Dynamic Link Library) is loaded, it can be called using the .C() function. A small wrapper function appropriate in this instance is given below:

dynamic<-function(n=10000,thin=500,seed=trunc(runif(1)*1e6))
{
  tmp=.C("gibbs",as.integer(n),as.integer(thin),
               as.integer(seed),x=as.double(1:n),
                  y=as.double(1:n))
  mat=cbind(1:n,tmp$x,tmp$y) 
  colnames(mat)=c("Iter","x","y")
  mat
}

Note how a random seed is generated in R to be passed to the C code to be used to seed the GSL random generator used within the C code. The code can then be run with a simple call to dynamic() and everything should work OK provided that all of the required libraries are found. This is the simplest way to link C code into R in a way that avoids the overhead associated with a system() call. However, this approach is also not without issues. In particular, the C code relies on the GSL, and more specifically on the random number streams provided by the GSL. These are completely separate from the random number streams used within the R system. In some situations it would make sense to use the same random number streams used within the R session, and to remove the dependence of the C code on the GSL.

Using the R API

The C code discussed in the previous section relies on the GSL only for the generation of (non-uniform) random numbers. Obviously R has its own very sophisticated system for handling random numbers and it is possible to use this system from within externally called C code using the R API. In particular, C versions of functions such as rnorm() and rgamma() can be called in C by including Rmath.h. Below is a version of the C code previously given modified to use the R random number generation routines and to remove all dependence on the GSL.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <R.h>
#include <Rmath.h>

void gibbsR(int *Np,int *thinp,double *xvec,double *yvec)
{
  int i,j;
  int N=*Np,thin=*thinp;
  GetRNGstate();
  double x=0;
  double y=0;
  for (i=0;i<N;i++) {
    for (j=0;j<thin;j++) {
      x=rgamma(3.0,1.0/(y*y+4));
      y=rnorm(1.0/(x+1),1.0/sqrt(x+1));
    }
    xvec[i]=x; yvec[i]=y;
  }
  PutRNGstate();
}

Note that a call to GetRNGstate() must be made before calling any random number functions and that a call to PutRNGstate() must be called before the function returns control back to R. This code can be compiled with a command like

R CMD SHLIB dynamicR.c

and linked into R with a command like

dyn.load(file.path(".",paste("dynamicR",.Platform$dynlib.ext,sep="")))

An appropriate wrapper for this code is given below:

dynamicR<-function(n=10000,thin=500)
{
  tmp=.C("gibbsR",as.integer(n),as.integer(thin),
                x=as.double(1:n),y=as.double(1:n))
  mat=cbind(1:n,tmp$x,tmp$y) 
  colnames(mat)=c("Iter","x","y")
  mat
}

This code is now slightly simpler, and the lack of dependence on external libraries such as the GSL makes it much easier to integrate into R packages, should this be desired.

Summary and further reading

Foreign language interfaces are a notoriously complex subject and this post has obviously just scratched the surface of the problem. For a few more examples, first see my old computer practicals on Stochastic simulation in R and C. The examples are a bit out of date, but easy to fix. Also see a howto by the Flemish Supercomputing Centre on a similar topic to this one. For more detailed information, see the manual on Writing R extensions, especially the sections on Foreign language interfaces and the R API. I also find Chapter 6 of R Programming for Bioinformatics to be a useful introduction to more complex aspects.

I have also somewhat belatedly re-discovered Charlie Geyer‘s notes on Calling C and Fortran from R, which covers very similar ground to this post. They were probably the unconscious inspiration for this post…