# Line plots of longitudinal summary data in R using ggplot2

I recently had an email for a colleague asking me to make a figure like this in ggplot2 or trellis in R:

As I know more about how to do things in ggplot2, I chose to use that package (if it wasn't obvious from the plot or other posts).

## Starting Point

Cookbook R/) has a great starting point for making this graph. The solution there is not sufficient for the desired graph, but that may not be clear why that is. I will go through most of the steps of customization on how to get the desired plot.

### Creating Data

To illustrate this, I will create some sample dataset:

N <- 30
id <- as.character(1:N) # create ids
sexes = c("male", "female")
sex <- sample(sexes, size = N/2, replace = TRUE) # create a sample of sex
diseases = c("low", "med", "high")
disease <- rep(diseases, each = N/3) # disease severity
times = c("Pre", "0", "30", "60")
time <- rep(times, times = N) # times measured
t <- 0:3
ntimes = length(t)
y1 <- c(replicate(N/2, rnorm(ntimes, mean = 10+2*t)),
replicate(N/2, rnorm(ntimes, mean = 10+4*t)))
y2 <- c(replicate(N/2, rnorm(ntimes, mean = 10-2*t)),
replicate(N/2, rnorm(ntimes, mean = 10-4*t)))
y3 <- c(replicate(N/2, rnorm(ntimes, mean = 10+t^2)),
replicate(N/2, rnorm(ntimes, mean = 10-t^2)))

data <- data.frame(id=rep(id, each=ntimes), sex=rep(sex, each=ntimes),
severity=rep(disease, each=ntimes), time=time,
Y1=c(y1), Y2=c(y2), Y3=c(y3)) # create data.frame
#### factor the variables so in correct order
data$sex = factor(data$sex, levels = sexes)
data$time = factor(data$time, levels = times)
data$severity = factor(data$severity, levels = diseases)

  id    sex severity time        Y1        Y2        Y3
1  1 female      low  Pre  9.262417 11.510636  9.047127
2  1 female      low    0 10.223988  8.592833 11.570381
3  1 female      low   30 13.650680  5.696405 13.954316
4  1 female      low   60 15.528288  5.313968 18.631744
5  2 female      low  Pre  9.734716 11.190081 10.086104
6  2 female      low    0 12.892207  7.897296  9.794494


We have a longitudinal dataset with 30 different people/units with different ID. Each ID has a single sex and disease severity. Each ID has 4 replicates, measuring 3 separate variables (Y1, Y2, and Y3) at each time point. The 4 time points are previous (Pre)/baseline, time 0, 30, and 60, which represent follow-up.

### Reformatting Data

In ggplot2, if you want to plot all 3 Y variables, you must have them in the same column, with another column indicating which variable you want plot. Essentially, I need to make the data “longer”. For this, I will reshape the data using the reshape2 package and the function melt.

library(reshape2)
long = melt(data, measure.vars = c("Y1", "Y2", "Y3") )

  id    sex severity time variable     value
1  1 female      low  Pre       Y1  9.262417
2  1 female      low    0       Y1 10.223988
3  1 female      low   30       Y1 13.650680
4  1 female      low   60       Y1 15.528288
5  2 female      low  Pre       Y1  9.734716
6  2 female      low    0       Y1 12.892207


It may not be clear what has been reshaped, but reordering the data.frame can illustrate that each Y variable is now a separate row:

head(long[ order(long$id, long$time, long$variable),], 10)   id sex severity time variable value 1 1 female low Pre Y1 9.262417 121 1 female low Pre Y2 11.510636 241 1 female low Pre Y3 9.047127 2 1 female low 0 Y1 10.223988 122 1 female low 0 Y2 8.592833 242 1 female low 0 Y3 11.570381 3 1 female low 30 Y1 13.650680 123 1 female low 30 Y2 5.696405 243 1 female low 30 Y3 13.954316 4 1 female low 60 Y1 15.528288  ## Creating Summarized data frame We will make a data.frame with the means and standard deviations for each group, for each sex, for each Y variable, for separate time points. I will use plyr to create this data.frame, using ddply (first d representing I'm putting in a data.frame, and the second d representing I want data.frame out): library(plyr) agg = ddply(long, .(severity, sex, variable, time), function(x){ c(mean=mean(x$value), sd = sd(x$value)) }) head(agg)   severity sex variable time mean sd 1 low male Y1 Pre 9.691420 1.1268324 2 low male Y1 0 12.145178 1.1218897 3 low male Y1 30 14.304611 0.3342055 4 low male Y1 60 15.885740 1.7616423 5 low male Y2 Pre 9.653853 0.7404102 6 low male Y2 0 7.652401 0.7751223  There is nothing special about means/standard deviations. It could be any summary measures you are interested in visualizing. We will also create the Mean + 1 standard deviation. We could have done standard error or a confidence interval, etc. agg$lower = agg$mean + agg$sd
agg$upper = agg$mean - agg$sd  Now, agg contains the data we wish to plot. ## Time is not on your side ### Time as a factor If you look at the plot we wish to make, we want the lines to be connected for times 0, 30, 60, but not for the previous data. Let's try using the time variable, which is a factor. We create pd, which will be a ggplot2 object, which tells that I wish to plot the means + error bars slightly next to each other. class(agg$time)

[1] "factor"

pd <- position_dodge(width = 0.2) # move them .2 to the left and right

gbase  = ggplot(agg, aes(y=mean, colour=severity)) +
geom_errorbar(aes(ymin=lower, ymax=upper), width=.3, position=pd) +
geom_point(position=pd) + facet_grid(variable ~ sex)
gline = gbase + geom_line(position=pd)
print(gline + aes(x=time))


None of the lines are connected! This is because time is a factor. We will use gbase and gline with different times to show how the end result can be achieved.

### Time as a numeric

We can make time a numeric variable, and simply replace Pre with -1 so that it can be plotted as well.

agg$num_time = as.numeric(as.character(agg$time))
agg$num_time[ is.na(agg$num_time) ] = -1
unique(agg$num_time)  [1] -1 0 30 60  In a previous post, I have discussed as an aside of creating a plot in ggplot2 and then creating adding data to the data.frame. You must use the %+% to update the data in the object. gline = gline %+% agg print(gline + aes(x=num_time))  If you look closely, you can see that Pre and time 0 are very close and not labeled, but also connected. As the scale on the x-axis has changed, the width of the error bar (set to 0.3), now is too small and should be changed if using this solution. Although there can be a discussion if the Pre data should be even on the same plot or the same timeframe, I will leave that for you to dispute. I don't think it's a terrible idea, and I think the plot works because the Pre and 0 time point data are not connected. There was nothign special about -1, and here we use -30 to make it evenly spaced: agg$num_time[ agg$num_time == -1 ] = -30 gline = gline %+% agg print(gline + aes(x=num_time))  That looks similar to what we want. Again, Pre is connected to the data, but we also now have a labeling problem with the x-axis somewhat. We still must change the width of the error bar in this scenario as well. ### Time as a numeric, but not the actual time point In the next case, we simply use as.numeric to the factor to create a variable new_time that will be 1 for the first level of time (in this case Pre) to the number of time points, in this case 4. agg$new_time = as.numeric(agg$time) unique(agg$new_time)

[1] 1 2 3 4

gline = gline %+% agg
print(gline + aes(x = new_time))


Here we have something similar with the spacing, but now the labels are not what we want. Also, Pre is still connected. The width of the error bars is now on a scale from 1-4, so they look appropriate.

## Creating a Separate data.frame

Here, we will create a separate data.frame for the data that we want to connect the points. We want the times 0-60 to be connected and the Pre time point to be separate.

sub_no_pre = agg[ agg$time != "Pre",]  ### Mulitple data sets in plot function Note, previously we did: gline = gbase + geom_line(position=pd)  This assumes that geom_line uses the same data.frame as the rest of the plot (agg). We can fully specify the arguments in geom_line so that the line is only for the non-Pre data: gbase = gbase %+% agg gline = gbase + geom_line(data = sub_no_pre, position=pd, aes(x = new_time, y = mean, colour=severity)) print(gline + aes(x = new_time))  Note, the arguments in aes should match the rest of the plot for this to work smoothly and correctly. ### Relabeling the axes Now, we simply need to re-label the x-axis so that it corresponds to the correct times: g_final = gline + aes(x=new_time) + scale_x_continuous(breaks=c(1:4), labels=c("Pre", "0", "30", "60"))  We could be more robust in this code, using the levels of the factor: time_levs = levels(agg$time)
g_final = gline + aes(x=new_time) +
scale_x_continuous(
breaks= 1:length(time_levs),
labels = time_levs)
print(g_final)


### Give me a break

My colleague also wanted to separate the panels a bit. We will use the panel.margin arguments and use the unit function from the grid package to define how far apart we want the axes.

library(grid)
g_final = g_final + theme(panel.margin.x = unit(1, "lines"),
panel.margin.y = unit(0.5, "lines"))
print(g_final)


I believe legends should be inside a plot for many reasons (I may write about that). Colors can be changed (see scale_colour_manual). Axis labels should be changed, and the Y should be labeled to what they are (this is a toy example).

Overall, this plot seems to be what they wanted and the default options work okay. I hope this illustrates how to customize a ggplot to your needs and how you may need to use multiple data.frames to achieve your desired result.

# Manipulate Package

The manipulate from RStudio allows you to create simple Tcl/Tk operators for interactive visualization. I will use it for a simple slider to view different slices of an image.

library(manipulate)


# fslr package

I'm calling the fslr package because I know that if you have it installed, you will likely have FSL and have a 1mm T1 template from MNI in a specific location. fslr also loads the oro.nifti package so that readNIfTI is accessible after loading fslr. You can download a test NIfTI image here if you don't have access to any and don't have FSL downlaoded.

Here I will read in the template image:

library(fslr)
options(fsl.path='/usr/local/fsl')
template = file.path(fsldir(), "data/standard",
"MNI152_T1_1mm_brain.nii.gz")


# The iplot function

The iplot function defined below takes in a nifti object, the specific plane to be plotted and additional options to be passed to oro.nifti::image. The function is located on my GitHub here.

iplot = function(img, plane = c("axial",
"coronal", "sagittal"), ...){
## pick the plane
plane = match.arg(plane, c("axial",
"coronal", "sagittal"))
# Get the max number of slices in that plane for the slider
ns=  switch(plane,
"axial"=dim(img)[3],
"coronal"=dim(img)[2],
"sagittal"=dim(img)[1])
## run the manipulate command
manipulate({
image(img, z = z, plot.type= "single", plane = plane, ...)
# this will return mouse clicks (future experimental work)
pos <- manipulatorMouseClick()
if (!is.null(pos)) {
print(pos)
}
},
## make the slider
z = slider(1, ns, step=1, initial = ceiling(ns/2))
)
}


# Example plots

Here are some examples of how this iplot function would be used:

iplot(img)
iplot(img, plane = "coronal")
iplot(img, plane = "sagittal")


The result will be a plotted image of the slice with a slider. This is most useful if you run it within RStudio.

Below are 2 example outputs of what you see in RStudio:

Slice 91:

Slice 145:

# Conclusions

The iplot function allows users to interactively explore neuroimages. The plotting is not as fast as I'd like, I may try to speed up the oro.nifti::image command or implement some subsampling. It does however show a proof of concept how interactive neuroimaging visualization can be done in R.

## Note

manipulate must be run in RStudio for manipulation. The fslr function fslview will call FSLView from FSL for interactive visualization. This is an option of interactive neuroimaging “in R”, but not a real or satisfactory implementation for me (even though I use it frequently). If anyone has implemented such a solution in R, I'd love to hear about it.

# matlabr: a Package to Calling MATLAB from R with system

In my research, I primarily use R, but I try to use existing code if available. In neuroimaging and other areas, that means calling MATLAB code. There are some existing solutions for the problem of R to MATLAB: namely the R.matlab package and the RMatlab package (which can call R from MATLAB as well). I do not use thse solutions usually though.

Previously, Mandy Mejia wrote “THREE WAYS TO USE MATLAB FROM R”. Option 2 is about how to use R.matlab, and Mandy gives and example with some cod. She also describes in Options 1 and 3 how to use the system command to call MATLAB commands.

I like this strategy options because:

1. I didn’t take the time to learn R.matlab.
2. It worked for me.
3. I wrote a package to wrap the options Mandy described: matlabr.

## matlabr: Wrapping together system calls to MATLAB

The matlabr package is located in GitHub and you can install it with the following command:

devtools::install_github("muschellij2/matlabr")


It has a very small set of functions and I will go through each function and describe what they do:

1. get_matlab: Mostly internal command that will return a character string that will be passed to system. If matlab is in your PATH (bash variable), and you are using R based on the terminal, the command would return "matlab". If MATLAB is not in your PATH or using a GUI-based system like RStudio, you must set options(matlab.path='/your/path/to/matlab').
2. have_matlab: Wrapper for get_matlab to return a logical if matlab is found.
3. run_matlab_script: This will pass a .m file to MATLAB. It also wraps the command in a try-catch statement in MATLAB so that if it fails, it will print the error message. Without this try-catch, if MATLAB errors, then running the command will remain in MATLAB and not return to R.
4. run_matlab_code: This takes a character vector of MATLAB code, ends lines with ;, writes it to a temporary .m file, and then runs run_matlab_script on the temporary .m file.
5. rvec_to_matlab: Takes in a numeric R vector and creates a MATLAB column matrix.
6. rvec_to_matlabclist: Takes in a vector from R (usually a character vector) and quotes these strings with single quotes and places them in a MATLAB cell using curly braces: { and }. It then stacks these cells into a “matrix” of cells.

## Setting up matlabr

Let’s set up the matlab.path as I’m running in RStudio:

library(matlabr)
options(matlab.path = "/Applications/MATLAB_R2014b.app/bin")
have_matlab()


The result from have_matlab() indicates that the matlab command can be called.

### Let’s write some code to test it

Here we will create some code to take a value for x, y, z (scalars) and a matrix named a and then save x, a, z to a text file:

code = c("x = 10",
"y=20;",
"z=x+y",
"a = [1 2 3; 4 5 6; 7 8 10]",
"save('test.txt', 'x', 'a', 'z', '-ascii')")
res = run_matlab_code(code)

/var/folders/1s/wrtqcpxn685_zk570bnx9_rr0000gr/T//RtmpHnOinq/file2f8352c04937.m


### Output

First off, we see that test.txt indeed was written to disk.

file.exists("test.txt")

[1] TRUE


We can read in the test.txt from using readLines:

output = readLines(con = "test.txt")
print(output)

[1] "   1.0000000e+01"
[2] "   1.0000000e+00   2.0000000e+00   3.0000000e+00"
[3] "   4.0000000e+00   5.0000000e+00   6.0000000e+00"
[4] "   7.0000000e+00   8.0000000e+00   1.0000000e+01"
[5] "   3.0000000e+01"


## Conclusions

matlabr isn’t fancy and most likely has some drawbacks as using system can have some quirks. However, these functions have been helpful for me to use some SPM routines and other MATLAB commands while remaining “within R“. R.matlab has a better framework, but it may not be as straightforward for batch processing. Also matlabr has some wrappers that will do a try-catch so that you don’t get stuck in MATLAB after calling system.

Let me know if this was helpful or if you have ideas on how to make this better. Or better yet, give a pull request.

# Goals and Overall Approach

We will use multiple packages and pieces of software for white matter (and gray matter/cerebro spinal fluid (CSF)) segmentation.

The overall approach will be, with the required packages in parentheses:

1. N4 Inhomogeneity Bias-Field Correction (extrantsr and ANTsR)
2. Brain extraction using BET and additional tools (extrantsr and fslr)
3. FAST for tissue-class segmentation. (fslr)

## Installing Packages

Below is a script to install all the current development versions of all packages. The current fslr packages depends on oro.nifti (>= 0.5.0) , which is located at muschellij2/oro.nifti or bjw34032/oro.nifti.

Note, the ITKR and ANTsR packages can take a long time to compile. The extrantsr package builds on ANTsR and makes some convenience wrapper functions.

devtools::install_github("muschellij2/oro.nifti")
devtools::install_github("muschellij2/fslr")
devtools::install_github("stnava/cmaker")
devtools::install_github("stnava/ITKR")
devtools::install_github("stnava/ANTsR")
devtools::install_github("muschellij2/extrantsr")
install.packages("scales")


Here we will load in the required packages. The scales package is imported just for the alpha function, used below in plotting.

rm(list=ls())
library(fslr)
library(extrantsr)
library(scales)


## Specifying FSL path

For fslr to work, FSL must be installed. If run in the Terminal, the FSLDIR environmental variable should be found using R's Sys.getenv("FSLDIR") function.

If run in an IDE (such as RStudio or the R GUI), R must know the path of FSL, as set by the following code:

options(fsl.path="/usr/local/fsl/")


## Image Filenames

Here we will set the image name. The nii.stub function will strip off the .nii.gz from img.name.

img.name = "SUBJ0001-01-MPRAGE.nii.gz"
img.stub = nii.stub(img.name)


# N4 Bias Field Correction

The first step in most MRI analysis is performing inhomogeneity correction. The extrantsr function bias_correct can perform N3 or N4 bias correction from the ANTsR package.

n4img = bias_correct( img.name, correction = "N4",
outfile = paste0(img.stub, "_N4.nii.gz") )

ortho2(n4img)


Let us note that the image is of the head and a bit of the neck. We wish to perform white matter segmentation only on the brain tissues, so we will do brain extraction.

# Brain Extraction

The extrantsr function fslbet_robust performs brain extraction. It relies on the fslr function fslbet which calls bet from FSL. It also performs neck removal (remove.neck = TRUE) and will perform BET once and then estimate a new center of gravity (COG) and then re-run BET. These functions are implemented in fslbet specifically, but these have been re-implemented in fslbet_robust in a slightly different way. fslbet_robust will also perform N4 inhomogeneity correction, but as this has already been performed above, we will set correct = FALSE.

For neck removal, a template brain and mask must be specified. We will use the T1, 1mm resolution, MNI brain included with FSL's installation.

bet = fslbet_robust(img = n4img,
retimg = TRUE,
remove.neck = TRUE,
template.file = file.path( fsldir(),
"data/standard",
"MNI152_T1_1mm_brain.nii.gz"),
"data/standard",
outfile = "SUBJ0001-01-MPRAGE_N4_BET",
correct = FALSE)


The results look good – the brain tissue is kept (in red) only. Not much brain tissue is discarded nor non-brain-tissue is included.

ortho2(n4img, bet > 0,
col.y=alpha("red", 0.5))


# FAST Image Segmentation

Now that we have a brain image, we can use FAST for image segmentation. We will use the fslr function fast, which calls fast from FSL. We will pass the -N option so that FAST will not perform inhomogeneity correction (different from N4 and N3), because we had performed this before.

fast = fast(file = bet,
outfile = paste0(img.stub, "_BET_FAST"),
opts = '-N')


## White Matter Results

By default, FAST assumes 3 tissue classes, generally white matter, gray matter, and CSF. These are generally ordered by the mean intensity of the class. For T1-weighted images, white matter is the highest intensity, and assigned class 3. Let's see the results:

ortho2(bet, fast == 3,
col.y=alpha("red", 0.5))


## Gray Matter / CSF Results

We can also visualize the classes for 1 and 2 for CSF and gray matter, respectively.

ortho2(bet, fast == 1, col.y=alpha("red", 0.5), text="CSF Results")


ortho2(bet, fast == 2, col.y=alpha("red", 0.5), text="Gray Matter\nResults")


The results indicate good segmentation of the T1 image. The fslr function fast result in more than the tissue-class segmentation, see the other files output:

list.files(pattern=paste0(img.stub, "_BET_FAST"))

[1] "SUBJ0001-01-MPRAGE_BET_FAST_mixeltype.nii.gz"
[2] "SUBJ0001-01-MPRAGE_BET_FAST_pve_0.nii.gz"
[3] "SUBJ0001-01-MPRAGE_BET_FAST_pve_1.nii.gz"
[4] "SUBJ0001-01-MPRAGE_BET_FAST_pve_2.nii.gz"
[5] "SUBJ0001-01-MPRAGE_BET_FAST_pveseg.nii.gz"
[6] "SUBJ0001-01-MPRAGE_BET_FAST_seg.nii.gz"


# Conclusions

It's a exciting time to be working in neuroimaging in R. The fslr and ANTsR packages provide functionality to perform operations for neuroimaging processing. I will be doing a series on some of the options for analysis in the coming weeks. The code for this analysis (and the data) is located at https://github.com/muschellij2/HopStat/blob/gh-pages/White_Matter_Segmentation_in_R/

### Notes

The fslr function ortho2 is a rewrite of the oro.nifti::orthographic function, but with different defaults and will set values of 0 in the second image (y argument) to NA.

# The Unofficial ENAR 2015 Itinerary Maker

It’s almost ENAR 2015! The final program is out with all the sessions. The last conference I went to, the International Stroke Conference, had a program planner hosted by abstracts online.

Although there are parts of this system I would like to change, I believe it is helpful for looking up sessions, presenters, and especially posters. Therefore, I introduce

## Functions and How to Use

Here is an example screen shot of the shiny app:

Each of the functions are as follows:

• Type of Session – you can choose from different session types, whether you want to limit to posters or short courses
• Select the day to subset data
• Select a specific session
• Search – this text field uses grep (after lower casing the field) to search the title and autor fields for relevant text.
• Download – this will download a CSV file of the subsetted table. Now note that this will not be exactly the table, but a Google Calendar-friendly format. This will be discussed in the next session.
• Donate button: I spent a good deal of work on this app and I believe it improves the conference. If you agree and would like to donate some money and/or a beer at ENAR 2015, I’d appreciate it.

### Individual Talks

Each individual session can be added to a Google Calendar using the Add to my Google calendar button next to each session. For standard posters, this will add the poster as the entire poster session. For specific talks, it will not add the complete session, but simply that talk.

## Feedback

Is any information is incorrect please let me know, either at @StrictlyStat or muschellij2@gmail.com. I spent a good deal of time cleaning the text from the PDF so I believe it should be mostly correct but obviously any last-minute changes I did not capture.

## My Sessions

Please stop by the poster session Poster Number 2b. (PDF of poster) and if you’re interested in neuroimaging processing and using R, please sign up for the “T4: A Tutorial for Multisequence Clinical Structural Brain MRI” that we are running.

## Code for app

The app is hosted on my GitHub along with the data used to run the app.

### If the app crashes

A backup (or mirror) shiny app is located at http://162.129.13.127/ENAR_2015/.

# Using Tables for Statistics on Large Vectors

This is the first post I’ve written in a while. I have been somewhat radio silent on social media, but I’m jumping back in.

Now, I work with brain images, which can have millions of elements (referred to as voxels). Many of these elements are zero (for background). We want to calculate basic statistics on the data usually and I wanted to describe how you can speed up operations or reduce memory requirements if you want to calculate many statistics on a large vector with integer values by using summary tables.

## Why to use Tables

Tables are relatively computationally expensive to calculate. They must operate over the entire vector, find the unique values, and bin the data into these values. Let $n$ be the length of the vector. For integer vectors (i.e. whole number), the number of unique values is much less than $n$. Therefore, the table is stored much more efficiently than the entire vector.

### Tables are sufficient statistics

You can think of the frequencies and bins as summary statistics for the entire distribution of the data. I will not discuss a formal proof here, but you can easily re-create the entire vector using the table (see epitools::expand.table for a function to do this), and thus the table is a sufficient (but not likely a minimal) statistic.

As a sufficient statistic, we can create any statistic that we’d like relatively easy. Now, R has very efficient functions for many statistics, such as the median and quantiles, so it may not make sense why we’d want to rewrite some of these functions using tables.

I can think of 2 reasons: 1) you want to calculate many statistics on the data and don’t want to pass the vector in multiple times, and 2) you want to preprocess the data to summarize the data into tables to only use these in memory versus the entire vector.

Here are some examples when this question has been asked on stackoverflow: 1, 2 and the R list-serv: 1. What we’re going to do is show some basic operations on tables to get summary statistics and show they agree.

## R Implementation

Let’s make a large vector:

set.seed(20150301)
vec = sample(-10:100, size= 1e7, replace = TRUE)


### Quantile function for tables

I implemented a quantile function for tables (of only type 1). The code takes in a table, creates the cumulative sum, extracts the unique values of the table, then computes and returns the quantiles.

quantile.table = function(tab, probs = c(0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1)){
n = sum(tab)
#### get CDF
cs = cumsum(tab)
### get values (x)
uvals = unique(as.numeric(names(tab)))

#  can add different types of quantile, but using default
m = 0
qs = sapply(probs, function(prob){
np = n * prob
j = floor(np) + m
g = np + m - j
# type == 1
gamma = as.numeric(g != 0)
cs &lt;= j
quant = uvals[min(which(cs &gt;= j))]
return(quant)
})
dig &lt;- max(2L, getOption(&quot;digits&quot;))
names(qs) &lt;- paste0(if (length(probs) &lt; 100)
formatC(100 * probs, format = &quot;fg&quot;, width = 1, digits = dig)
else format(100 * probs, trim = TRUE, digits = dig),
&quot;%&quot;)
return(qs)
}


### Quantile Benchmarks

Let’s benchmark the quantile functions: 1) creating the table and then getting the quantiles, 2) creating an empircal CDF function then creating the quantiles, 3) creating the quantiles on the original data.

library(microbenchmark)
options(microbenchmark.unit='relative')
qtab = function(vec){
tab = table(vec)
quantile.table(tab)
}
qcdf = function(vec){
cdf = ecdf(vec)
quantile(cdf, type=1)
}
# quantile(vec, type = 1)
microbenchmark(qtab(vec), qcdf(vec), quantile(vec, type = 1), times = 10L)

Unit: relative
expr       min        lq     mean    median       uq
qtab(vec) 12.495569 12.052644 9.109178 11.589662 7.499691
qcdf(vec)  5.407606  5.802752 4.375459  5.553492 3.708795
quantile(vec, type = 1)  1.000000  1.000000 1.000000  1.000000 1.000000
max neval cld
5.481202    10   c
2.653728    10  b
1.000000    10 a


### More realistic benchmarks

Not surprisingly, simply running quantile on the vector beats the other 2 methods, by far. So computational speed may not be beneficial for using a table. But if tables or CDFs are already created in a previous processing step, we should compare that procedure:

options(microbenchmark.unit=&quot;relative&quot;)
tab = table(vec)
cdf = ecdf(vec)
all.equal(quantile.table(tab), quantile(cdf, type=1))

[1] TRUE

all.equal(quantile.table(tab), quantile(vec, type=1))

[1] TRUE

microbenchmark(quantile.table(tab), quantile(cdf, type=1), quantile(vec, type = 1), times = 10L)

Unit: relative
expr      min       lq     mean   median       uq
quantile.table(tab)    1.000    1.000   1.0000    1.000   1.0000
quantile(cdf, type = 1)  774.885 1016.172 596.3217 1144.063 868.8105
quantile(vec, type = 1) 1029.696 1122.550 653.2146 1199.143 910.3743
max neval cld
1.0000    10  a
198.1590    10   b
206.5936    10   b


As we can see, if you had already computed tables, then you get the same quantiles as performing the operation on the vector, and also much faster results. Using quantile on a ecdf object is not much better, which mainly is due to the fact that the quantile function remakes the factor and then calculate quantiles:

stats:::quantile.ecdf

function (x, ...)
quantile(evalq(rep.int(x, diff(c(0, round(nobs * y)))), environment(x)),
...)
&lt;bytecode: 0x107493e28&gt;
&lt;environment: namespace:stats&gt;


### Median for tables

Above we show the quantile.table function, so the median function is trivial where probs = 0.5:

median.table = function(tab){
quantile.table(tab, probs = 0.5)
}


## Mean of a table

Other functions can be used to calculate statstics on the table, such as the mean:

mean.table = function(tab){
uvals = unique(as.numeric(names(tab)))
sum(uvals * tab)/sum(tab)
}
mean.table(tab)

[1] 44.98991

mean(tab)

[1] 44.98991

mean(cdf)

Warning in mean.default(cdf): argument is not numeric or logical:
returning NA

[1] NA


As we see, we can simply use mean and do not need to define a new function for tables.

mean(vec)

[1] 44.98991

all.equal(mean(tab), mean(vec))

[1] TRUE


### Subsetting tables

One problem with using mean vs. mean.table is when you subset the table or perform an operation that causes it to lose the attribute of the class of table. For example, let’s say I want to estimate the mean of the data for values $> 0$:

mean(vec[vec &gt; 0])

[1] 50.50371

over0 = tab[as.numeric(names(tab)) &gt; 0]
mean(over0)

[1] 90065.98

mean.table(over0)

[1] 50.50371

class(over0)

[1] &quot;array&quot;


We see that after subsetting, over0 is an array and not a table, so mean computes the mean using the array method, treating the frequences as data and the estimated mean is not correct. mean.table calculates the correct value, as it does not depend on the class of tab. Another way to circumvent this is to reassign a class of table to over0:

class(over0) = &quot;table&quot;
mean(over0)

[1] 50.50371


This process requires the user to know what the class is of the object passed to mean, and may not be correct if the user changes the class of the object.

### Aside on NA values

Let’s see what happens when there are NAs in the vector. We’ll put in 20 NA values:

navec = vec
navec[sample(length(navec), 20)] = NA
natab = table(navec, useNA=&quot;ifany&quot;)
nacdf = ecdf(navec)
mean(navec)

[1] NA

mean(natab)

[1] NA

# mean(nacdf)


We see that if we table the data with NA being a category, then any operation that returns NA if NA are present will return NA. For example, if we do a table on the data with the table option useNA="always", then the mean will be NA even though no NA are present in the original vector. Also, ecdf objects do not keep track of NA values after they are computed.

tab2 = table(vec, useNA=&quot;always&quot;)
mean(tab2)

[1] NA

nonatab = table(navec, useNA=&quot;no&quot;)
mean(nonatab)

[1] 44.98993

mean(navec, na.rm=TRUE)

[1] 44.98993


If you are using tables for statistics, the equivalent of na.rm=FALSE is table(..., useNA="ifany") and na.rm=TRUE is table(..., useNA="no"). We also see that an object of ecdf do not ever show NAs. Although we said tables are sufficient statistics, that may not be entirely correct if depending on how you make the table when the data have missing data.

### Mean benchmark

Let’s benchmark the mean function, assuming we have pre-computed the table:

options(microbenchmark.unit=&quot;relative&quot;)
microbenchmark(mean(tab), mean(vec), times = 10L)

Unit: relative
expr      min       lq     mean   median       uq      max neval cld
mean(tab)   1.0000   1.0000   1.0000   1.0000   1.0000  1.00000    10  a
mean(vec) 374.0648 132.3851 111.2533 104.7355 112.7517 75.21185    10   b


Again, if we have the table pre-computed, then estimating means is much faster using the table.

## Getting standard deviation

The mean example may be misleading when we try sd on the table:

sd(vec)

[1] 32.04476

sd(tab)

[1] 302.4951


This are not even remotely close. This is because sd is operating on the table as if it were a vector and not a frequency table.

Note, we cannot calculate sd from the ecdf object:

sd(cdf)

Error in as.double(x): cannot coerce type 'closure' to vector of type 'double'


## SD and Variance for frequency table

We will create a function to run sd on a table:

var.table = function(tab){
m = mean(tab)
uvals = unique(as.numeric(names(tab)))
n = sum(tab)
sq = (uvals - m)^2
## sum of squared terms
var = sum(sq * tab) / (n-1)
return(var)
}
sd.table = function(tab){
sqrt(var.table(tab))
}
sd.table(tab)

[1] 32.04476


We create the mean, get the squared differences, and sum these up (sum(sq * tab)) , divide by n-1 to get the variance and the sd is the square root of the variance.

### Benchmarking SD

Let’s similarly benchmark the data for sd:

options(microbenchmark.unit=&quot;relative&quot;)
microbenchmark(sd.table(tab), sd(vec), times = 10L)

Unit: relative
expr      min       lq    mean   median       uq      max neval
sd.table(tab)   1.0000   1.0000   1.000    1.000   1.0000   1.0000    10
sd(vec) 851.8676 952.7785 847.225 1142.225 732.3427 736.2757    10
cld
a
b


## Mode of distribution

Another statistic we may want for tabular data is the mode. We can simply find the maximum frequency in the table. The multiple option returns multiple values if there is a tie for the maximum frequency.

mode.table = function(tab, multiple = TRUE){
uvals = unique(as.numeric(names(tab)))
ind = which.max(tab)
if (multiple){
ind = which(tab == max(tab))
}
uvals[ind]
}
mode.table(tab)

[1] 36


## Memory of each object

We wish to simply show the memory profile for using a table verus the entire vector:

format(object.size(vec), &quot;Kb&quot;)

[1] &quot;39062.5 Kb&quot;

format(object.size(tab), &quot;Kb&quot;)

[1] &quot;7.3 Kb&quot;

round(as.numeric(object.size(vec) / object.size(tab)))

[1] 5348


We see that the table much smaller than the vector. Therefore, computing and storing summary tables for integer data can be much more efficient.

# Conclusion

Tables are computationally expensive. If tables are pre-computed for integer data, however, then statistics can be calculated quickly and accurately, even if NAs are present. These tables are also much smaller in memory so that they can be stored with less space. This may be an important thing to think about computing and storage of large vectors in the future.

# The average Stripe employee! Congrats to Alyssa!

Recently, my colleague and fellow blogger Alyssa Frazee accepted a job at Stripe. All of us at JHU Biostat are happy for her, yet sad to see her go.

While perusing Stripe’s website, I found the About page, where each employee has a photo of themselves. I’ve been playing around with some PCA and decompositions, so I figured I’d play around with these photos and make some principal components/eigenfaces. (I think it’s funny when people use the SVD/Eigenvalue decomposition in a new field and name the new thing the eigen-whatever.)

## Extracting the HTML

Let’s note that stripe uses https and not http for their website (not surprisingly as they do secure payment systems).

library(RCurl)
library('httr')
library('XML')

url.stub = 'https://stripe.com/'


As they use https, you cannot simply read the data into R using readLines or other functions. For this, I used curl in the RCurl package. I defined my certification, got the page, extracted the content as a character vector (imaginatively named x), then parsed the HTML using the XML pagckage.

cafile <- system.file('CurlSSL', 'cacert.pem', package = 'RCurl')
page <- GET(
url.stub,
config(cainfo = cafile)
)

x <- content(page, as='text')

#########################
# Parse HTML
#########################
doc <- htmlTreeParse(x, asText=TRUE, useInternal=TRUE)


Now that I have parsed the HTML document, I can use XPath. If you look at the source of the HTML, there is a div with the id of about, which contains all the links. The xpathSApply function takes the document, the XPath query, which says I want to go to that div, grab all img tags and then get the src.

#########################
# Get face URLs
#########################
urls = xpathSApply(doc,
path=paste0(stub, '//img'),
xmlGetAttr, 'src')


I then created an output directory imgdir where I’ll store the images (stored as pngs). Below is just some checking to see if I have already downloaded (in case I had to re-run the code) and only downloads images I don’t already have.

img.urls = paste0(url.stub, urls)
out.imgs = file.path(imgdir, basename(img.urls))

stopifnot(!any(duplicated(img.urls)))
have = file.exists(out.imgs)
img.urls = img.urls[!have]
out.imgs = out.imgs[!have]
###########
##########
for (iimg in seq_along(img.urls)){
method='curl')
}


Again, since Stripe uses https, we cannot just use download.file with the default method. I again used curl to get the images. I (manually) downloaded and cropped the image from Alyssa’s biostat page to add her to the Stripe set.

## Analyze the Images

I now take all the images, read them in using readPNG. readPNG returns an array, and the first 3 dimensions are the RGB if the image is color; they are not 3D arrays if the images are grayscale, but none in this set are. The 4th dimension is the alpha level if there is opacity, but this information is discarded in the readPNG(img.f)[, , 1:3] statement.

library(png)
library(pixmap)
library(matrixStats)
imgs = list.files(imgdir, pattern='.png$', full.names = TRUE) n_imgs = length(imgs) img.list = vector(mode= 'list', length = n_imgs) iimg = 2 for ( iimg in seq(n_imgs)){ img.f = imgs[iimg] img.list[[iimg]] = readPNG(img.f)[, , 1:3] }  ### Same Image Size To make things easier, I only kept images that were 200 pixels by 200 pixels, so each image was the same size. If you had images of different sizes, you may want to do interpolation to get the same size and resolution. dims = lapply(img.list, dim) ################################ # Don't feel like interpolating - only keeping 200x200x3 ################################ dimg = c(200, 200, 3) keep = sapply(dims, function(x) all(x == dimg)) img.list = img.list[keep] imgs = imgs[keep] dims = dims[keep]  We then make a matrix of 12000 by N (N = 167), where the rows are the concatenated values from the red, green, and blue values. ################################ # Making Matrix: P x N ################################ mat = t(sapply(img.list, c)) cmeans = colMeans(mat) sds = colSds(mat)  ## Mean Image A small function makeimg takes in a vector/matrix, creates an array of $200\times200\times3$ and plots the image using pixmapRGB from the pixmap package. Here we plot the “Average Striper”. makeimg = function(x, trunc = FALSE, ...){ x = array(x, dim = dimg) if (trunc){ x[x < 0] = 0 x[x &gt; 1] = 1 } plot(pixmapRGB(x), ...) } makeimg(cmeans, main = 'Average Striper')  ## PCA Although this is what’s in common for Stripe pictures, let’s do a quick PCA (or equivalently SVD) to get the principal components after centering and scaling our data to see what’s different: # ############# # # Centering and scaling matrix # ############# X = t(t(mat) - cmeans) X = t(t(X) / sds) pca = prcomp(X, center=FALSE)  We can get the percent variance explained from standardized eigenvalues (proportional to the squared deviances), or just use screeplot: devs = pca$sdev^2 / sum(pca$sdev^2) plot(1-devs, main='Percent Variance Explained', type='l')  screeplot(pca)  ### Plot the PCs Although we would need about 3 components to recover a large percent of the variance of the data. For illustration, we plot the mean image and the first 9 principal components (PCs). V <- pca$rotation #sample PCs from PCA
################################
# Plotting Mean Image and PCs
################################

par(mfrow=c(2, 5))
par(oma = rep(2, 4), mar=c(0, 0, 3, 0))
makeimg(cmeans, main = 'Average Striper')

for (i in 1:9){
makeimg(V[,i],main = paste0('PC ', i))  #PCs from sample data
}


## Conclusion

This post was more about congratulating Alyssa with some analysis, but I still want to discuss the results.

We can see some pattern in the data from the PCs, but you need many PCs to explain a larger percent of the variance in the data. That is not surprising; this data is not standardized in the way people took the pictures, such as front-facing, with different backgrounds, and I’m using the color information rather than black and white.

We would likely also have more interpretable results if we registered images. In neuroimaging, we register brains to each other and average them to make a template image. We could do that in this analysis and should do so if this was a real project and not a post.

Moreover, we are doing a PCA on non-negative values bounded between 0 and 1. I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of the data. In many analyses using PCA we actually always have positive values. For example people’s food choices is one example where non-negative matrix factorization is used; you can’t eat negative calories…if only. I think this is something to look into for people who are doing PCA on strictly positive values. Although you demean and scale the data and make values negative, you can re-construct data from this components and their scores to get non-interpretable values such as those outside [0, 1]. I’m looking into the nsprcomp package for non-negative PCA for future research work.