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I have this great little function summarise_posterior (given below) as part of my package driver (available here).

The function is great and super useful. The one problem is that I have been working on larger and larger data and it can be very slow. In short, my question is: Is there a tidyverse-esque way of speeding this up while still retaining the key flexibility of this function (see examples in documentation).

At least one key speed up could come from figuring out how to put the calculation of the quantiles in a single call rather than calling the quantile function over and over. The latter option which is currently implemented is probably re-sorting same vectors over and over.

#' Shortcut for summarize variable with quantiles and mean
#'
#' @param data tidy data frame
#' @param var variable name (unquoted) to be summarised
#' @param ... other expressions to pass to summarise
#'
#' @return data.frame
#' @export
#' @details Notation: codepX refers to the codeX% quantile
#' @import dplyr
#' @importFrom stats quantile
#' @importFrom rlang quos quo UQ
#' @examples
#' d <- data.frame("a"=sample(1:10, 50, TRUE),
#' "b"=rnorm(50))
#'
#' # Summarize posterior for b over grouping of a and also calcuate
#' # minmum of b (in addition to normal statistics returned)
#' d <- dplyr::group_by(d, a)
#' summarise_posterior(d, b, mean.b = mean(b), min=min(b))
summarise_posterior <- function(data, var, ...)
 qvar <- enquo(var)
 qs <- quos(...)


 data %>%
 summarise(p2.5 = quantile(!!qvar, prob=0.025),
 p25 = quantile(!!qvar, prob=0.25),
 p50 = quantile(!!qvar, prob=0.5),
 mean = mean(!!qvar),
 p75 = quantile(!!qvar, prob=0.75),
 p97.5 = quantile(!!qvar, prob=0.975),
 !!!qs)

Rcpp back-end options are also more than welcome.

Thanks!

Here's a solution that makes use of nesting to avoid calling quantile multiple times. Any time you need to store a vector of results inside summarize, simply wrap it inside list. Afterwards, you can unnest these results, pair them up against their names, and use spread to put them in separate columns:

summarise_posterior2 <- function(data, var, ...)
 qvar <- ensym(var)
 vq <- c(0.025, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 0.975)

 summarise( data, .qq = list(quantile(!!qvar, vq, names=FALSE)),
 .nms = list(str_c("p", vq*100)), mean = mean(!!qvar), ... ) %>%
 unnest %>% spread( .nms, .qq ) 

This doesn't give you nearly the same speed up as @jay.sf's solution

d <- data.frame("a"=sample(1:10, 5e5, TRUE), "b"=rnorm(5e5)) 
microbenchmark::microbenchmark( f1 = summarise_posterior(d, b, mean.b = mean(b), min=min(b)),
 f2 = summarise_posterior2(d, b, mean.b = mean(b), min=min(b)) )
# Unit: milliseconds
# expr min lq mean median uq max neval
# f1 49.06697 50.81422 60.75100 52.43030 54.17242 200.2961 100
# f2 29.05209 29.66022 32.32508 30.84492 32.56364 138.9579 100

but it will work correctly with group_by and inside nested functions (whereas substitute-based solutions will break when nested).

r1 <- d %>% dplyr::group_by(a) %>% summarise_posterior(b, mean.b = mean(b), min=min(b))
r2 <- d %>% dplyr::group_by(a) %>% summarise_posterior2(b, mean.b = mean(b), min=min(b))
all_equal( r1, r2 ) # TRUE

If you profile the code, you can see where the major hang ups are

Rprof()
for( i in 1:100 )
 d %>% dplyr::group_by(a) %>% summarise_posterior2(b, mean.b = mean(b), min=min(b))
Rprof(NULL)
summaryRprof()$by.self %>% head
# self.time self.pct total.time total.pct
# ".Call" 1.84 49.73 3.18 85.95
# "sort.int" 0.94 25.41 1.12 30.27
# "eval" 0.08 2.16 3.64 98.38
# "tryCatch" 0.08 2.16 1.44 38.92
# "anyNA" 0.08 2.16 0.08 2.16
# "structure" 0.04 1.08 0.08 2.16

The .Call corresponds mainly to the C++ backend of dplyr, while sort.int is the worker behind quantile(). @jay.sf's solution gains a major speedup by decoupling from dplyr, but it also loses the associated flexibility (e.g., integration with group_by). Ultimately, it's up to you to decide which is more important.

Why not something like this?

summarise_posterior2 <- function(data, x, ...)
 x <- deparse(substitute(x))
 nm <- deparse(substitute(...))
 M <- matrix(unlist(data[, x]), ncol=length(data[, x]))
 qs <- t(sapply(list(...), do.call, list(M)))
 'rownames<-'(cbind(p2.5 = quantile(M, prob=0.025),
 p25 = quantile(M, prob=0.25),
 p50 = quantile(M, prob=0.5),
 mean = mean(M),
 p75 = quantile(M, prob=0.75),
 p97.5 = quantile(M, prob=0.975), qs), NULL
 )


> summarise_posterior2(df1, X4, mean=mean, mean=mean, min=min)
 p2.5 p25 p50 mean p75 p97.5 mean mean min
[1,] 28.2 30 32 32 34 35.8 32 32 28

# > summarise_posterior(df1, X4, mean.b = mean(X4), min=min(X4))
# p2.5 p25 p50 mean p75 p97.5 mean.b min
# 1 28.2 30 32 32 34 35.8 32 28

Runs six times faster:

> microbenchmark::microbenchmark(orig.fun=summarise_posterior(df1, X4, max(X4), min(X4)),
+ new.fun=summarise_posterior2(df1, X4, max=max, min=min))
Unit: microseconds
 expr min lq mean median uq max neval
 orig.fun 4289.541 4324.490 4514.1634 4362.500 4411.225 8928.316 100
 new.fun 716.071 734.694 802.9949 755.867 778.317 4759.439 100

Data

df1 <- data.frame(matrix(1:144, 9, 16))