[R] Reproducibility Between Local and Remote Computer with R

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 09/08/2020 8:33 a.m., Kevin Egan wrote:
> Hi Abby,
> 
> After running a few tests on my local and remote versions of R, this seems
> to be the most plausible answer to the problem. I put set.seed(123)
> several times within my code and produced the same results but would rather
> not have to do that if possible.

You should look at the doRNG package, which addresses exactly this 
problem.  See its vignette, vignette("doRNG", package="doRNG").

Duncan Murdoch
> 
> 
> On Sat, Aug 8, 2020 at 6:05 PM Abby Spurdle <spurdle.a using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Kevin,
>>
>> Intuitively, the first step would be to ensure that all versions of R,
>> and all the R packages, are the same.
>>
>> However, you mention HPC.
>> And the glmnet package imports the foreach package, which appears
>> (after a quick glance) to support multi-core and parallel computing.
>>
>> If your code uses parallel computing (?), you may need to look at how
>> random numbers, and related results, are handled...
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Aug 9, 2020 at 1:14 AM Kevin Egan <kevinegan31 using gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I posted this question:
>>>
>>> I am currently using R , RStudio , and a remote computer (using an R
>> script) to run the same code. I start by using set.seed(123) in all three
>> versions of the code, then using glmnet to assess a matrix. Ultimately, I
>> am having trouble reproducing the results between my local and the remote
>> computer's results. I am using R version 4.0.2 locally, and R version 3.6.0
>> remote.
>>>
>>> After running several tests, I'm wondering if there is a difference
>> between the two versions in R which may lead to slightly different
>> coefficients. If anyone has any insight I would appreciate it.
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>>
>>> and found that there were slight differences between using rnorm with
>> R-4.0.2 and R-3.6.0 but did not find any differences for runif between both
>> systems. In my original code, I am using rnorm and was wondering if this
>> may be the reason I am finding slight differences in coefficients for
>> glmnet and lars testing between using my local computer (R-4.0.2) and my
>> remote computer (R-3.6.0). I am running my code locally on a MacOSX and
>> remote on what I believe is an HPC.
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>>          [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>
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> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help using r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>