Remove highly correlated variables

Question

I have a huge dataframe 5600 X 6592 and I want to remove any variables that are correlated to each other more than 0.99 I do know how to do this the long way, step by step i.e.

Answer 1

I'm sure there are many ways to do this and certainly some better than this, but this should work. I basically just set the upper triangle to be zero and then remove any rows that have values over 0.99.

> tmp <- cor(data)
> tmp[upper.tri(tmp)] <- 0
> diag(tmp) <- 0
# Above two commands can be replaced with 
# tmp[!lower.tri(tmp)] <- 0
#
> 
> data.new <- data[,!apply(tmp,2,function(x) any(x > 0.99))]
> head(data.new)
   V2 V3 V5
1   2 10  4
2   2 20 10
3   5 10 31
4   4 20  2
5 366 10  2
6  65 20  5