[R] A slightly unorthodox matrix product.

[Thomas Jagger]

> Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2018 17:52:37 +1200
>
> From: Rolf Turner <r.turner using auckland.ac.nz>
> To: r-help <r-help using r-project.org>
> Subject: [R] A slightly unorthodox matrix product.
> Message-ID: <e0073e07-31b3-20df-c20d-6c565c857554 using auckland.ac.nz>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"
>
>
> Can anyone think of a sexy way of forming following "product"?
>
> Given matrices A and B, both with m rows, form a 3 dimensional array C
> such that:
>
>      C[i,j,k] = A[i,j]*B[i,k]
>
> I *think* that the following does what I want.  (I keep confusing
> myself, so I'm not sure!)
>
> library(abind)
> xxx <- lapply(1:nrow(a),function(i,a,b){a[i,]%o%b[i,]},a=A,b=B)
> do.call(abind,c(xxx,list(along=3)))
>
> Is there a cleverer way?
>
> cheers,
>
> Rolf Turner
>
> --
> Technical Editor ANZJS
> Department of Statistics
> University of Auckland
> Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276

Dear Rolf,
Try the following:

B<-matrix(1:12,3,4)

C<-as.vector(A[,rep(seq(ncol(A)),ncol(B))])*as.vector(B[,rep(seq(ncol(B)),each=ncol(A))])
dim(C) <- c(nrow(A),ncol(A),ncol(B))

#test it on column 2 should return true
all(C[,,2]==A*B[,rep(2,ncol(A))])
#on all columns (sapply returns 9 rows with 3 columns all values are TRUE)

all( sapply(seq(ncol(C)),function(i) (C[,,i]==A*B[,rep(i,ncol(A))]) ) )

Note that it creates the final array by taking advantage of the
column-major ordering in R.
Initially, we create a vector by multiplying elementwise the 2 vectors
internally associated with each matrix,
finally,  we generate our  3D array by adding the dimensions attribute, a
vector of 3  elements.

This method should be fairly fast since we are using internal R matrix
addressing, and not multiple function calls required by lapply ().
I hope this helps
Thomas Jagger

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