How to implement coalesce efficiently in R

Question

Background

Several SQL languages (I mostly use postgreSQL) have a function called coalesce which returns the first non null column element for each row. This can b

Answer 1

Using dplyr package:

library(dplyr)
coalesce(a, b, c)
# [1]  1  2 NA  4  6

Benchamark, not as fast as accepted solution:

coalesce2 <- function(...) {
  Reduce(function(x, y) {
    i <- which(is.na(x))
    x[i] <- y[i]
    x},
    list(...))
}

microbenchmark::microbenchmark(
  coalesce(a, b, c),
  coalesce2(a, b, c)
)

# Unit: microseconds
#                expr    min     lq     mean median      uq     max neval cld
#   coalesce(a, b, c) 21.951 24.518 27.28264 25.515 26.9405 126.293   100   b
#  coalesce2(a, b, c)  7.127  8.553  9.68731  9.123  9.6930  27.368   100  a 

But on a larger dataset, it is comparable:

aa <- sample(a, 100000, TRUE)
bb <- sample(b, 100000, TRUE)
cc <- sample(c, 100000, TRUE)

microbenchmark::microbenchmark(
  coalesce(aa, bb, cc),
  coalesce2(aa, bb, cc))

# Unit: milliseconds
#                   expr      min       lq     mean   median       uq      max neval cld
#   coalesce(aa, bb, cc) 1.708511 1.837368 5.468123 3.268492 3.511241 96.99766   100   a
#  coalesce2(aa, bb, cc) 1.474171 1.516506 3.312153 1.957104 3.253240 91.05223   100   a