Question

I have a function that at the moment programmed in a functional model and either want to speed it up and maybe solve the problem more in the spirit of R.
I have a data.frame and want to add a column based on information that’s where every entry depends on two rows.
At the moment it looks like the following:

faultFinging <- function(heartData){
    if(heartData$Pulse[[1]] == 0){
        Group <- 0
    }
    else{
        Group <- 1
    }
    for(i in seq(2, length(heartData$Pulse), 1)){
        if(heartData$Pulse[[i-1]] != 0 
            && heartData$Pulse[[i]] != 0
            && abs(heartData$Pulse[[i-1]] - heartData$Pulse[[i]])<20){
            Group[[i]] <- 1
        }
        else{
            if(heartData$Pulse[[i-1]] == 0 && heartData$Pulse[[i]] != 0){
                Group[[i]] <- 1
            }
            else{
                Group[[i]] <- 0
            }
        }
    }
    Pulse<-heartData$Pulse
    Time<-heartData$Time
    return(data.frame(Time,Pulse,Group))
}

Answer 1

I can’t test this without sample data, but this is the general idea. You can avoid doing the for() loop entirely by using & and | which are vectorized versions of && and ||. Also, there’s no need for an if-else statement if there’s only one value (true or false).

faultFinging <- function(heartData){
    Group <- as.numeric(c(heartData$Pulse[1] != 0,
      (heartData$Pulse[-nrow(heartData)] != 0 
        & heartData$Pulse[-1] != 0
        & abs(heartData$Pulse[-nrow(heartData)] - heartData$Pulse[-1])<20) |
      (heartData$Pulse[-nrow(heartData)] == 0 & heartData$Pulse[-1] != 0)))
    return(cbind(heartData, Group))
}

Putting as.numeric() around the index will set TRUE to 1 and FALSE to 0.