Re: Logical comparisons of items in a two lists
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg75478] Re: Logical comparisons of items in a two lists
- From: Jean-Marc Gulliet <jeanmarc.gulliet at gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 2 May 2007 03:53:54 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
- References: <f16q2u$7er$1@smc.vnet.net>
actuary at mchsi.com wrote:
> Hello:
>
> I have two lists of real numbers, a & b. I want two compare
> individual items in one list to the corresponding items in the other
> list. For example Is a[[1]] > b[[1]]. At the end of the comparisons,
> I want to count the "Trues". I know how to do this use a "Table"
> statement and a "Count" statement. Is there a quicker, more efficient
> way of counting the number of "Trues".
>
> Thanks
>
> Larry
>
>
Hi Larry,
Since you show neither your code (or a similar example) nor any timing,
it is hard to tell where the bottleneck is located, although I would bet
on the *Table* part.
In the code below, we compare two lists of 10,000,000 real numbers
(machine precision) each. Comparing the pairs of elements with *Table*
took nearly twice the time needed by *MapThread*. (Note that the
difference is less dramatic for smaller values of n.) Moreover, you can
see that the built-in function *Count* is highly efficient: it took less
than 0.8 second to count all the *True* values.
In[1]:=
$HistoryLength=0;
n=7;
a=Table[Random[],{10^n}];
b=Table[Random[],{10^n}];
Timing[comp=Table[a[[i]]>b[[i]],{i,10^n}];]
Timing[comp=MapThread[#1>#2&,{a,b}];]
Timing[Count[comp,True]]
Out[5]=
{30.563 Second,Null}
Out[6]=
{18.766 Second,Null}
Out[7]=
{0.797 Second,4998689}
Of course, you may have done something completely different, by I could
not read your mind!
Best regards,
Jean-Marc