[R] how to work with big matrices and the ff-package?

[Anne Skoeries]

Hello everyone, 

I need to create and work with some big matrices that actually have somewhat over 2 million columns and 117 rows. To do some calculations on such big matrices R just needs too much memory for my PC (4GB installed). So I need a solution to work with large datasets. I'm trying to use the ff-package but I  don't think I really understand the whole functionality of the package. Hopefully someone can help me either with the ff-package or a different solution.


I am saving some calculated matrices as ff-objects as follows:

require(ff)
nr <- 117; nc <- 50
dat <- sample(0:100, size=(nr*nc), replace=TRUE)
a <- matrix(dat, nrow=nr)

ncols <- (nc*(nc-1))/2
b <- ff(vmode="double", dim=c(nr, ncols))
namb <- vector(mode="character", length=ncols)
x <- 1
for(i in 1:(nc-1)){
	for(j in (i+1):nc){
		b[,x] <- a[,i]+a[,j]
		namb[x] <- paste(i, "_", j, sep="")
		x <- x+1
	}
}
dimnames(b)[[2]] <- namb

After the above step I need to convert my ff_matrix to a data.frame to discretize the whole matrix and calculate the mutual information. The calculated result should be saved as an ffdf-object or something similar.

require(infotheo)
disc <- as.ffdf(discretize(as.data.frame(as.ffdf(cc)), disc="equalwidth", nbins=5))

This won't work. After this step it somehow loses the path to the working directory. As soon as I try to discretize the next data.frame I get the following message:
Error in if (dfile == getOption("fftempdir")) finalizer <- "delete" else finalizer <- "close" : 
  Argument has length 0
Error in setwd(cwd) : character as argument expected

I would be really glad if anybody can help me understanding the functionality and show me how to convert between the different data types. 

Thanks in advance, 
Anne S.