Array turns an array into a sparse Array. There is a special behavior when a dataframe is supplied. Such a dataframe is treated as `long format`, i.e. the columns of the dataframe are treated as dimensions of the Array, and all rows of the dataframe are interpreted as entries. The coordinates are given by the ordering of the levels in the dataframe, and the dimnames are given by the levels.
sparseArray constructs sparse Arrays from a matrix of indices and a vector of values. dim and dimnames can be added as in simple_sparse_array
as.Matrix turns a simple_triplet_matrix into a dgTMatrix.