doCallWE: Innermost Computation: Error Catching Version of do.call()

Description

doCallWE() performs the innermost computation of the simulation study at hand. It is a version of do.call(f, argl, *), with care of catching and storing both error and warnings (via tryCatch.W.E()) and measures user time. This is useful in large(r) simulation studies.

mkTimer() returns a function to be passed as timer to doCallWE().

Usage

doCallWE(f, argl,         timer = mkTimer(gcFirst=FALSE))
mkTimer(gcFirst)

Arguments

a function which given data and parameters, computes the statistic we are simulating.

argl

list of arguments for f().

timer

a function similar to system.time(); by default, measure user time in milliseconds.

gcFirst

logical, passed to system.time(), as it is called from the resulting function mkTimer().

Value

doCallWE() returns a list with components
valuef$(\langle \mathtt{argl} \rangle)$, if there was no error, or NULL otherwise.
errorerror message (see simpleError or stop()) or NULL.
warningwarning message (see simpleWarning or warning()) or NULL.
timetime, as measured by timer().

Details

Note that gcFirst=FALSE is default for a good reason: if a call to doOne() is relatively fast, calling gc() every time is unnecessarily expensive and may completely dominate the overall simulation run time. gcFirst=TRUE is preferable otherwise, as it ensures less variable timings, see system.time.

Examples

Run this code

set.seed(61)
L <- log(abs(rt(n=100, df = 1.5)))
r <- doCallWE(quantile, list(L, probs= 0.95))
## set timer for  "no timing" :
u <- doCallWE(quantile, list(L, probs= 0.95), timer = function(E) { E; NULL })
stopifnot(is.null(r$error),
	  all.equal(r$value, quantile(L, 0.95)),
	  identical(r[1:3], u[1:3]), is.null(u[["time"]]))