how to interpolate a cumulative function in python - python-3.x

I have a cumulative function (CDF) made of 6 points. I have to interpolate it so I used interp1d (from scipy.interpolate import interp1d), the results is the following:
the blue dots are the initial data and the red curve is after linear intepolation.
However, I am not really happy about it especially between the point 4 and 5 the assumption of linear relation is underestimating the real curve (if I think of this curve as a sigmoid or hyperbolic tangent). Therefore I tried to use always interp1d but with quadratic and cubic and the result is catastrofic
the output makes no sense and it completely wrong, so my question is
how to make my original linear fit a bit more smooth and similar to a real cumulative function?
Thanks, Luigi

Try monotone interpolants, akima/pchip

Related

Pandas Interpolation Method 'Cubic' - spline or polynomial?

I am trying to understand interpolation in pandas and I don't seem to understand if the method 'cubic' is a polynomial interpolation of order 3 or a spline. Does anybody know what pandas uses behind that method?
In interpolation methods, 'polynomial' generally means that you generate a polynomial with the same number of coefficients as you have data points. So, for 10 data points you would get an order 9 polynomial.
'cubic' generally means piecewise 3rd order polynomials. A sliding window of 4 data points is used to generate these cubic polynomials.

How do I visualise orthogonal parameter steps in gradient descent, using Matplotlib?

I have implemented multivariate linear regression, where parameters theta0 (intersect), theta1, theta2 are optimized by minimizing MSE loss, chosen with line search in gradient descent. How do I visually illustrate the mathematical property that the direction of steepest descent (negative gradient) of successive steps are orthogonal? I'm trying to generate a contour map similar to this image: Plot, but with respect to 2 parameters instead of 1 (if it's not possible, 2 separate plots would also be great).
Also, I originally wanted to perform multivariate linear regression with 4 features, but ultimately decided to use only the 2 most strongly correlated ones (after comparing their PCC) in order to be able to plot a graph. Although I'm not aware of any way to plot 4-dimensional data, does anyone know if this is possible and how?

Average and Measure of Spread of 3D Rotations

I've seen several similar questions, and have some ideas of what I might try, but I don't remember seeing anything about spread.
So: I am working on a measurement system, ultimately computer vision based.
I take N captures, and process them using a library which outputs pose estimations in the form of 4x4 affine transformation matrices of translation and rotation.
There's some noise in these pose estimations. The standard deviation in Euler angles for each axis of rotation is less than 2.5 degrees, so all orientations are pretty close to each other (for a case where all Euler angles are close to 0 or 180). Standard errors of less than 0.25 degrees are important to me. But I have already run into the problems endemic to Euler angles.
I want to average all these pretty-close-together pose estimates to get a single final pose estimate. And I also want to find some measure of spread so that I can estimate accuracy.
I'm aware that "average" isn't actually well defined for rotations.
(For the record, my code is in Numpy-heavy Python.)
I also may want to weight this average, since some captures (and some axes) are known to be more accurate than others.
My impression is that I can just take the mean and standard deviation of the translation vector, and that for the rotation I can convert to quaternions, take the mean, and re-normalize with OK accuracy since these quaternions are pretty close together.
I've also heard mentions of least-squares across all the quaternions, but most of my research into how this would be implemented has been a dismal failure.
Is this workable? Is there a reasonably well-defined measure of spread in this context?
Without more info about your geometry setup is hard to answer. Anyway for rotations I would:
create 3 unit vectors
x=(1,0,0),y=(0,1,0),z=(0,0,1)
and apply the rotation on them and call the output
x(i),y(i),z(i)
it is just applying the matrix(i) with position at (0,0,0)
do this for all measurements you have
now average all vectors
X=avg(x(1),x(2),...x(n))
Y=avg(y(1),y(2),...y(n))
Z=avg(z(1),z(2),...z(n))
correct the vector values
so make each of the X,Y,Z unit vectors again and take the axis which is more closest to the rotation axis as main axis. It will stay as is and recompute the remaining two axises as cross product of main axis and the other vector to ensure orthogonality. Beware of the multiplication order (wrong order of operands will negate the output)
construct averaged transform matrix
see transform matrix anatomy as origin you can use averaged origin of the measurement matrices
Moakher wrote a paper that explains there are basically two ways to take an average of Rotation matrices. The first is a weighted average followed by a projection back to SO(3) using the SVD. The second is the Riemannian center of mass. That one is a closer notion to the geometric mean, and its more complicated to compute.

Two Dimensional Curve Approximation

here is what I want to do (preferably with Matlab):
Basically I have several traces of cars driving on an intersection. Each one is noisy, so I want to take the mean over all measurements to get a better approximation of the real route. In other words, I am looking for a way to approximate the Curve, which has the smallest distence to all of the meassured traces (in a least-square sense).
At the first glance, this is quite similar what can be achieved with spap2 of the CurveFitting Toolbox (good example in section Least-Squares Approximation here).
But this algorithm has some major drawback: It assumes a function (with exactly one y(x) for every x), but what I want is a curve in 2d (which may have several y(x) for one x). This leads to problems when cars turn right or left with more then 90 degrees.
Futhermore it takes the vertical offsets and not the perpendicular offsets (according to the definition on wolfram).
Has anybody an idea how to solve this problem? I thought of using a B-Spline and change the number of knots and the degree until I reached a certain fitting quality, but I can't find a way to solve this problem analytically or with the functions provided by the CurveFitting Toolbox. Is there a way to solve this without numerical optimization?
mbeckish is right. In order to get sufficient flexibility in the curve shape, you must use a parametric curve representation (x(t), y(t)) instead of an explicit representation y(x). See Parametric equation.
Given n successive points on the curve, assign them their true time if you know it or just integers 0..n-1 if you don't. Then call spap2 twice with vectors T, X and T, Y instead of X, Y. Now for arbitrary t you get a point (x, y) on the curve.
This won't give you a true least squares solution, but should be good enough for your needs.

Bézier curve compute point from one axis

I have a Cubic Bézier curve. But I have a problem when I need only one point. I have only value from the X-axis and want to find a value that coresponds to Y-axis to that point. Or find the t step, from it I can easely calculate the Y-axis.
Any clue how to do it? Or is there any formula to do this?
Any solution will have to deal with the fact that there may be multiple solutions if the curve is not X monotone. Consider the cubic bezier (0,0),(2,0),(-1,1),(1,1):
As you can see, there are 4 parameter values (and Y coordinates) at which X==1/2.
This means that if you use subdivision (which is probably your simplest solution), then you need to be careful that your initial bounding t values only surround the point you want.
You can also guess what this implies about the order of an algebraic solution.
A parametric curve extends to any dimension by adding coefficients for those dimensions. Are you sure you've got things straight? It seems like you are using the x-axis as the curve parameter t. The t parameter controls the computations of X- and Y-coordinates by having two cubic equations. Take a look at Wikipedia which provides some pretty neat explanations for the 2D case.
Edit:
Solve as a general third-degree polynomial. Beware that it might have 3 solutions, though.

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