Computing the null space of a bigmatrix in R

Question

I can not find any function or package to calculate the null space or (QR decomposition) of a bigmatrix (from library(bigmemory)) in R. For example:

library(bigmemory)

a <- big.matrix(1000000, 1000, type='double', init=0)

I tried the following but got the errors shown. How can I find the null space of a bigmemory object?

a.qr <- Matrix::qr(a)
# Error in as.vector(data) : 
#   no method for coercing this S4 class to a vector
q.null <- MASS::Null(a)
# Error in as.vector(data) : 
#   no method for coercing this S4 class to a vector

Answer 1

If you want to compute the full SVD of the matrix, you can use package bigstatsr to perform computations by block. A FBM stands for a Filebacked Big Matrix and is an object similar to a filebacked big.matrix object of package bigmemory.

library(bigstatsr)
options(bigstatsr.block.sizeGB = 0.5)

# Initialize FBM with random numbers
a <- FBM(1e6, 1e3)
big_apply(a, a.FUN = function(X, ind) {
  X[, ind] <- rnorm(nrow(X) * length(ind))
  NULL
}, a.combine = 'c')

# Compute t(a) * a
K <- big_crossprodSelf(a, big_scale(center = FALSE, scale = FALSE))

# Get v and d where a = u * d * t(v) the SVD of a
eig <- eigen(K[])
v <- eig$vectors
d <- sqrt(eig$values)

# Get u if you need it. It will be of the same size of u
# so that I store it as a FBM.
u <- FBM(nrow(a), ncol(a))
big_apply(u, a.FUN = function(X, ind, a, v, d) {
  X[ind, ] <- sweep(a[ind, ] %*% v, 2, d, "/")
  NULL
}, a.combine = 'c', block.size = 50e3, ind = rows_along(u),
a = a, v = v, d = d)

# Verification
ind <- sample(nrow(a), 1000)
all.equal(a[ind, ], tcrossprod(sweep(u[ind, ], 2, d, "*"), v))

This takes approximately 10 minutes on my computer.