Paulo Guimaraes <[email protected]> reports,
> [...] I tried to code in Mata the equivalent to the following Stata
> command:
>
> . egen newvar=mean(var), by(id)
His goal was to see if he could write code in Mata that would be faster
then -egen- (an ado-file), and he failed. He made two attempts. He reported
these results, and I have duplicated them:
---- Timings by ---- Ratio
Guimaraes Gould Gould/Guimaraes
-----------------------------------------------------------
egen 0.59 0.24 .41
Attempt 1 65.81 93.94 1.43 (1)
Attempt 2 0.86 0.40 .47
-----------------------------------------------------------
Notes:
1. Gould's attempt to reproduce Attempt 1 also
resulted in incorrect results.
2. Times are in seconds.
3. Evidently I (Gould) have a faster computer than Paulo,
although mine is a middle of the road computer by modern
standards. Mine is an Intel 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo running
64-bit Stata under Linux.
One of Paulo's questions was why Attempt 1 is running so slowly. I haven't
looked into that because, in addition to running slowly, Attempt 1 is
producing incorrect results on my computer, and I assume it is
doing the same on Paulo's. The program has a bug.
Attempt 2, on the other hand, works perfectly and, in fact, is running
pretty quickly. Paulo finds Attempt 2 takes 1.46 times as long as egen,
and on my comp[uter, the multiplier is 1.15.
Paulo wants to know how speed up Attempt 2, too. Answer: I don't know
how. I made two attempts and produced code that I considered prettier
but in fact ran more slowly. Actually, I wasn't surprised by that.
My expectation was based on a comparison of what is true and what is
theoretically possible in comparisons of C and Mata. Mata produces
P-code, which must be interpreted. C produces machine language.
Mata's low-level functions (i=0, i++, etc.) run 2 to 4 times slower than
compiled C code. Said differently, they run at an overhead of
of 1:1 to 3:1. One-to-one (1:1) means that, to execute one machine
instruction on behalf of the user, Mata executes one additional instruction
just to figure out what needs to be done. Three-to-one means three additional
instructions are executed to execute the one instruction on behalf of the
user.
1:1 may seem like a theoretical lower bound, but it is not. Consider
a high-level function such as matrix inversion. It might take the Mata
P-code interpreter 5 or even 10 machine instructions to figure out what
needs to be done, and then it would execute a million machine instructions
that were needed for the problem, the same million instructions C would
have to execute, too. Thus, the overhead would be .000005:1.
But for very low level instructions for which there is a one-to-one matching
with the instruction set on the chip, such as i++, 1:1 is a theoretical
lower bound. So why not produce machine language rather than P-code?
Because in that case, the compiled code would not be portable.
All the above has to do with a comparison of Mata and C. Paulo is comparing
Mata to ado-code, however. The ado-code to which Paulo is comparing,
however, is not typical or rather, it is what should be typical when
ado-code is used for the appropriate problem. In this case, most of the
ado-code time is being spent in just a few highly efficient Stata
commands which themselves are implemented in C.
The problem Paulo set up,
. egen newvar=mean(var), by(id) (1)
could have been solved via
. sort id
. by id: gen newvar = sum(var)/_n (2)
. by id: replace newvar = newvar[_N]
On my computer, the time required for solution (1) was 0.24 seconds.
Solution (2) would have taken 0.11 seconds. In fact, solution (2)
is exactly what -egen- implements. So -egen- is running at
45.8% efficiency. What could have been done by Stata's C code in
.11 seconds, took -egen- .24 seconds.
As an aside, let me add that -sort-, -by id:-, -gen-, and -replace-
are four features we have worked very hard on to make as efficient
as possible. There are 4,901 lines of C code involved in implementing
these functions for the problem given.
In Paulo's Alternative 2, he wrote 27 lines of code, and on my computer, it
ran in .47 seconds. Thus, the ratio is .47/.11 = 4.27. This is about the
ratio we expect to see on low-level code.
Paulo did as well as could be expected.
Note well, when Mata is used on problems requiring matrix inversion or other
heavy lifting, which includes implementation of statistical commands for which
Mata was designed, this multiplier of 4.27 falls, and can even fall to 2 or
even just a little more than 1. That is why we use Mata for our statistical
development. The fact remains, however, that for problems where the solution
involves only Mata's low-level features, we expect a multiplier of 4.
So when I saw Paulo's question, I knew I was unlikely to have a better
answer for him. Nonetheless, I tried.
Here, for Paulo's information, was my final result:
void function mean_by2(string scalar var, string scalar groupid)
{
real scalar i, j, j0, j1, sum, mean
real colvector id, y, p, y2
transmoprhic info
st_view(id, ., groupid)
st_view(y, ., var)
p = order(id, 1)
info=panelsetup(my_y, 1)
st_view(y2, ., st_addvar("double", "_y2"))
for (i=1; i<=rows(info); i++) {
j0 = info[i, 1]
j1 = info[i, 2]
sum = 0
mean = mean(my_y[|j0\j1|])
for (j=j0; j<=j1; j++) y2[p[j]] = mean
}
}
My embarrassment is that this took 0.77 seconds to run on my computer,
versus .47 seconds for Paulo's Attempt 2. I am nonetheless convinced
that a combination of Paulo's code and mine could run faster. Who knows,
we might even get down to .40 seconds from Paulo's .47.
Paulo, my one comment about your Attempt 2 is putting all the data together
in one matrix and then sorting it. In my attempt, I keep the data in
separate vectors, and rather than using sort(), I use order() to obtain
the permutation vector and then use it where I need it.
My goal was to prevent coding things like data[,2], which requires
exectracting the second column from a matrix, and will require
extra time to execute.
-- Bill
[email protected]
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