Dividing columns by colSums in R

Per usual, Joris has a great answer. Two others that came to mind:

#Essentially your answer
f1 <- function() m / rep(colSums(m), each = nrow(m))
#Two calls to transpose
f2 <- function() t(t(m) / colSums(m))
#Joris
f3 <- function() sweep(m,2,colSums(m),`/`)

Joris' answer is the fastest on my machine:

> m <- matrix(rnorm(1e7), ncol = 10000)
> library(rbenchmark)
> benchmark(f1,f2,f3, replications=1e5, order = "relative")
  test replications elapsed relative user.self sys.self user.child sys.child
3   f3       100000   0.386   1.0000     0.385    0.001          0         0
1   f1       100000   0.421   1.0907     0.382    0.002          0         0
2   f2       100000   0.465   1.2047     0.386    0.003          0         0

See ?sweep, eg:

> sweep(m,2,colSums(m),`/`)
           [,1]      [,2]      [,3]
[1,] 0.08333333 0.1333333 0.1666667
[2,] 0.33333333 0.3333333 0.3333333
[3,] 0.58333333 0.5333333 0.5000000

or you can transpose the matrix and then colSums(m) gets recycled correctly. Don't forget to transpose afterwards again, like this :

> t(t(m)/colSums(m))
           [,1]      [,2]      [,3]
[1,] 0.08333333 0.1333333 0.1666667
[2,] 0.33333333 0.3333333 0.3333333
[3,] 0.58333333 0.5333333 0.5000000

Or you use the function prop.table() to do basically the same:

> prop.table(m,2)
           [,1]      [,2]      [,3]
[1,] 0.08333333 0.1333333 0.1666667
[2,] 0.33333333 0.3333333 0.3333333
[3,] 0.58333333 0.5333333 0.5000000

The time differences are rather small. the sweep() function and the t() trick are the most flexible solutions, prop.table() is only for this particular case