R: conditional expand.grid function

Question

I would like to find all combinations of vector elements that matches a specific condition. The function expand.grid returns all possible combinations without checking for a specific condition. It is possible to test for a specific condition after using the expand.grid function, but in some situations the number of possible combinations is too large to generate them with expand.grid. Therefore is there a function that allows me to check for a condition while generating all possible combinations.

This is a simplified version of the problem:

A <- seq.int(12, from=0, by=1)*15
B <- seq.int(27, from=0, by=1)*23
C <- seq.int(18, from=0, by=1)*18
D <- seq.int(33, from=0, by=1)*10

out<-expand.grid(A,B,C,D) #out is a dataframe with 235144 x 4 as dimensions
idx<-which(rowSums(out)<=400 & rowSums(out)>=300) #Only a small fraction of 'out' is needed
results <- out(idx,)

Answer 1

In a word, no. After all, if you knew a priori which combinations were desirable/undesirable, you could exclude them from the expansion, e.g. expand.grid(A[A<20],B[B<15],...) . In the general case, which I'm assuming is your real question, you have no simple way to exclude portions of the input vectors.

You might just want to write a multilevel loop which tests each combination in turn and saves or rejects it. This will be slow (again, unless you come up with some clever algorithm to predict regions which are all TRUE or FALSE). So, in the long run, you may be better off using some of the R-packages which partition large calculations (and datasets) so as to avoid exceeding your memory limits.

Now that I've said all that, someone's going to post a link to a package which does exactly that :-(