Finding the minimum of a vector

Dirk Eddelbuettel — written Dec 21, 2012 — source

This example was motivated by http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5158219/find-minimum-of-vector-in-rcpp and addresses how to find the minumum value and its position index in a vector.

#include <Rcpp.h>
using namespace Rcpp;

// [[Rcpp::export]]
double vecmin(NumericVector x) {
  // Rcpp supports STL-style iterators
  NumericVector::iterator it = std::min_element(x.begin(), x.end());
  // we want the value so dereference 
  return *it;
}

We can also use the iterator to compute the position, simply by taking the offset to the vector beginning.

// [[Rcpp::export]]
int vecminInd(NumericVector x) {
  // Rcpp supports STL-style iterators
  NumericVector::iterator it = std::min_element(x.begin(), x.end());
  // we want the value so dereference 
  return it - x.begin();
}

A quick illustration follows. Note that we pad the position by one to adjust for the 0-based versus 1-based indexing between C++ and R.

set.seed(5)
x <- sample(1:100, 10)  # ten out 100
x

 [1] 21 68 90 28 11 67 50 76 88 96

cat("Min is ", vecmin(x), " and at position ", vecminInd(x)+1, "\n")

Min is  11  and at position  5

Of course, we subsequently added min and which_min as sugar functions, but this example still illustrated how useful the STL algoritms can be.

tags: stl

Extending R with C++ and Fortran — Dirk Eddelbuettel and JBrandon Duck-Mayr
Benchmarking Rcpp code with RcppClock — Zach DeBruine
Simulation Smoother using RcppArmadillo — Tomasz Woźniak

Finding the minimum of a vector

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