Split a vector into chunks

Question

I have to split a vector into n chunks of equal size in R. I couldn\'t find any base function to do that. Also Google didn\'t get me anywhere. Here is what I came up with so

Answer 1

Try the ggplot2 function, cut_number:

library(ggplot2)
x <- 1:10
n <- 3
cut_number(x, n) # labels = FALSE if you just want an integer result
#>  [1] [1,4]  [1,4]  [1,4]  [1,4]  (4,7]  (4,7]  (4,7]  (7,10] (7,10] (7,10]
#> Levels: [1,4] (4,7] (7,10]

# if you want it split into a list:
split(x, cut_number(x, n))
#> $`[1,4]`
#> [1] 1 2 3 4
#> 
#> $`(4,7]`
#> [1] 5 6 7
#> 
#> $`(7,10]`
#> [1]  8  9 10

Answer 2

This will split it differently to what you have, but is still quite a nice list structure I think:

chunk.2 <- function(x, n, force.number.of.groups = TRUE, len = length(x), groups = trunc(len/n), overflow = len%%n) { 
  if(force.number.of.groups) {
    f1 <- as.character(sort(rep(1:n, groups)))
    f <- as.character(c(f1, rep(n, overflow)))
  } else {
    f1 <- as.character(sort(rep(1:groups, n)))
    f <- as.character(c(f1, rep("overflow", overflow)))
  }
  
  g <- split(x, f)
  
  if(force.number.of.groups) {
    g.names <- names(g)
    g.names.ordered <- as.character(sort(as.numeric(g.names)))
  } else {
    g.names <- names(g[-length(g)])
    g.names.ordered <- as.character(sort(as.numeric(g.names)))
    g.names.ordered <- c(g.names.ordered, "overflow")
  }
  
  return(g[g.names.ordered])
}

Which will give you the following, depending on how you want it formatted:

> x <- 1:10; n <- 3
> chunk.2(x, n, force.number.of.groups = FALSE)
$`1`
[1] 1 2 3

$`2`
[1] 4 5 6

$`3`
[1] 7 8 9

$overflow
[1] 10

> chunk.2(x, n, force.number.of.groups = TRUE)
$`1`
[1] 1 2 3

$`2`
[1] 4 5 6

$`3`
[1]  7  8  9 10

Running a couple of timings using these settings:

set.seed(42)
x <- rnorm(1:1e7)
n <- 3

Then we have the following results:

> system.time(chunk(x, n)) # your function 
   user  system elapsed 
 29.500   0.620  30.125 

> system.time(chunk.2(x, n, force.number.of.groups = TRUE))
   user  system elapsed 
  5.360   0.300   5.663 

Note: Changing as.factor() to as.character() made my function twice as fast.

Answer 3

Sorry if this answer comes so late, but maybe it can be useful for someone else. Actually there is a very useful solution to this problem, explained at the end of ?split.

> testVector <- c(1:10) #I want to divide it into 5 parts
> VectorList <- split(testVector, 1:5)
> VectorList
$`1`
[1] 1 6

$`2`
[1] 2 7

$`3`
[1] 3 8

$`4`
[1] 4 9

$`5`
[1]  5 10

Answer 4

This splits into chunks of size ⌊n/k⌋+1 or ⌊n/k⌋ and does not use the O(n log n) sort.

get_chunk_id<-function(n, k){
    r <- n %% k
    s <- n %/% k
    i<-seq_len(n)
    1 + ifelse (i <= r * (s+1), (i-1) %/% (s+1), r + ((i - r * (s+1)-1) %/% s))
}

split(1:10, get_chunk_id(10,3))

Answer 5

If you don't like split() and you don't mind NAs padding out your short tail:

chunk <- function(x, n) { if((length(x)%%n)==0) {return(matrix(x, nrow=n))} else {return(matrix(append(x, rep(NA, n-(length(x)%%n))), nrow=n))} }

The columns of the returned matrix ([,1:ncol]) are the droids you are looking for.

Answer 6

You could combine the split/cut, as suggested by mdsummer, with quantile to create even groups:

split(x,cut(x,quantile(x,(0:n)/n), include.lowest=TRUE, labels=FALSE))

This gives the same result for your example, but not for skewed variables.