TL;DR
No need for combn or the like, simply:
min(abs(diff(sort(v))))
The Nitty Gritty
Finding the difference between every possible combinations is O(n^2). So when we get to vectors of length 1e5, the task is burdensome both computationally and memory-wise.
We need a different approach.
How about sorting and taking the difference only with its neighbor?
By first sorting, for any element vj, the difference min |vj - vj -/+ 1| will be the smallest such difference involving vj. For example, given the sorted vector v:
v = -9 -8 -6 -4 -2 3 8
The smallest distance from -2 is given by:
|-2 - 3| = 5
|-4 - -2| = 2
There is no need in checking any other elements.
This is easily implemented in base R as follows:
getAbsMin <- function(v) min(abs(diff(sort(v))))
I'm not going to use rpois as with any reasonably sized vector, duplicates will be produces, which will trivially give 0 as an answer. A more sensible test would be with runif or sample (minimumAbsoluteDifference2 is from the answer provided by @RuiBarradas):
set.seed(1729)
randUnif100 <- lapply(1:100, function(x) {
runif(1e3, -100, 100)
})
randInts100 <- lapply(1:100, function(x) {
sample(-(1e9):(1e9), 1e3)
})
head(sapply(randInts100, getAbsMin))
[1] 586 3860 2243 2511 5186 3047
identical(sapply(randInts100, minimumAbsoluteDifference2),
sapply(randInts100, getAbsMin))
[1] TRUE
options(scipen = 99)
head(sapply(randUnif100, getAbsMin))
[1] 0.00018277206 0.00020549633 0.00009834766 0.00008395873 0.00005299225 0.00009313226
identical(sapply(randUnif100, minimumAbsoluteDifference2),
sapply(randUnif100, getAbsMin))
[1] TRUE
It's very fast as well:
library(microbenchmark)
microbenchmark(a = getAbsMin(randInts100[[50]]),
b = minimumAbsoluteDifference2(randInts100[[50]]),
times = 25, unit = "relative")
Unit: relative
expr min lq mean median uq max neval
a 1.0000 1.0000 1.0000 1.0000 1.00000 1.00000 25
b 117.9799 113.2221 105.5144 107.6901 98.55391 81.05468 25
Even for very large vectors, the result is instantaneous;
set.seed(321)
largeTest <- sample(-(1e12):(1e12), 1e6)
system.time(print(getAbsMin(largeTest)))
[1] 3
user system elapsed
0.083 0.003 0.087