Is there a way to find median of a unsorted array using heap ? If it is possible, is it more efficient than using sorting and then finding median ?
The trick here is to use two heaps of which one is min-heap and other is max-heap. I will not go in details, but the following points are sufficient to implement the required algorithm.
The top of the min-heap is the smallest element greater than or equal to the mean
The top of the max-heap is the largest element less than or equal to the mean.
Now coming to your second question, it is only efficient if you want to find the running median i.e. the median just after inserting a new element each time into the array.
If you want to calculate the median of all the array elements just once, then sorting will be a good idea.
Hope this helps.
I have a set of data say {4,7,7,10,10,12,12,14,15,67} and i want to know the 95th Percentile. I used Excel and Online calculator.
Both gave different answers.
In Excel, formula i used : =PERCENTILE.INC(A1:A10,0.95) and result = 43.6
But this online percentile calculator yielded a result of 67
Which one is right?
First of all, both methods are "right" in the sense that both implement a standard algorithm for computing percentiles. Unlike the mean or median (where all sources use the same approach) there are many different approaches to calculating percentiles. The fundamental issue is that there is no obvious solution to the problem of what to do with percentiles which fall between observations. Do you take the observed value which is closest? Do you interpolate between the two? If so -- with what weighting factors do you do the interpolation? Wikipedia discusses nine (!) with both the Excel approach and the approach from that online percentile calculator making the list. See this paper for a very nice discussion of these algorithms.
You can replicate the functionality of that online percentile function like thus:
=SMALL(A1:A10,CEILING.MATH(COUNT(A1:A10)*0.95))
For example:
The point of using the function SMALL rather than a direct numerical index is that this approach works even if the data isn't sorted.
-randomized approach does not guarantee better space time complexity.
-choosing median as pivot guarantees the best space time complexity,same as that of merge sort.(also making quicksort better than merge sort as quicksort is easier to code)
and yet people always teach to use the randomized approach to pick a pivot, even though it is the worst option among the above two approaches.
why?
Suppose you have a very large list of numbers which would be expensive to sort. They are real numbers/decimals but all lie in the same range, say 0 to n for some integer n. Are there any methods for estimating percentiles that don't require sorting the data i.e. an algorithm that has better complexity than the fastest sorting algorithm.
Note: The tag is quantiles only because there is no existing tag for percentiles and it wouldn't let me create one; my question is not specific to quantiles.
In order to find the p-th percentile of a set of N numbers, essentially you are trying to find the k-th largest number where k = N*p/100 (rounded down, I think--or on second thought, thinking of the median, for example, maybe it's rounded up).
You might try the median of medians algorithm, which is supposed to be able to find the k-th largest number among N numbers in O(N) time.
I don't know where this is implemented in a standard library but a proposed implementation
was posted in one of the answers to this question.
We have a application where users enter prices all day. These prices are recorded in a table with a timestamp and then used for producing charts of how the price has moved... Every now and then the user enters a price wrongly (eg. puts in a zero to many or to few) which somewhat ruins the chart (you get big spikes). We've even put in an extra confirmation dialogue if the price moves by more than 20% but this doesn't stop them entering wrong values...
What statistical method can I use to analyse the values before I chart them to exclude any values that are way different from the rest?
EDIT: To add some meat to the bone. Say the prices are share prices (they are not but they behave in the same way). You could see prices moving significantly up or down during the day. On an average day we record about 150 prices and sometimes one or two are way wrong. Other times they are all good...
Calculate and track the standard deviation for a while. After you have a decent backlog, you can disregard the outliers by seeing how many standard deviations away they are from the mean. Even better, if you've got the time, you could use the info to do some naive Bayesian classification.
That's a great question but may lead to quite a bit of discussion as the answers could be very varied. It depends on
how much effort are you willing to put into this?
could some answers genuinely differ by +/-20% or whatever test you invent? so will there always be need for some human intervention?
and to invent a relevant test I'd need to know far more about the subject matter.
That being said the following are possible alternatives.
A simple test against the previous value (or mean/mode of previous 10 or 20 values) would be straight forward to implement
The next level of complexity would involve some statistical measurement of all values (or previous x values, or values of the last 3 months), a normal or Gaussian distribution would enable you to give each value a degree of certainty as to it being a mistake vs. accurate. This degree of certainty would typically be expressed as a percentage.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_function there are adequate links from these pages to help in programming these, also depending on the language you're using there are likely to be functions and/or plugins available to help with this
A more advanced method could be to have some sort of learning algorithm that could take other parameters into account (on top of the last x values) a learning algorithm could take the product type or manufacturer into account, for instance. Or even monitor the time of day or the user that has entered the figure. This options seems way over the top for what you need however, it would require a lot of work to code it and also to train the learning algorithm.
I think the second option is the correct one for you. Using standard deviation (a lot of languages contain a function for this) may be a simpler alternative, this is simply a measure of how far the value has deviated from the mean of x previous values, I'd put the standard deviation option somewhere between option 1 and 2
You could measure the standard deviation in your existing population and exclude those that are greater than 1 or 2 standard deviations from the mean?
It's going to depend on what your data looks like to give a more precise answer...
Or graph a moving average of prices instead of the actual prices.
Quoting from here:
Statisticians have devised several methods for detecting outliers. All the methods first quantify how far the outlier is from the other values. This can be the difference between the outlier and the mean of all points, the difference between the outlier and the mean of the remaining values, or the difference between the outlier and the next closest value. Next, standardize this value by dividing by some measure of scatter, such as the SD of all values, the SD of the remaining values, or the range of the data. Finally, compute a P value answering this question: If all the values were really sampled from a Gaussian population, what is the chance of randomly obtaining an outlier so far from the other values? If the P value is small, you conclude that the deviation of the outlier from the other values is statistically significant.
Google is your friend, you know. ;)
For your specific question of plotting, and your specific scenario of an average of 1-2 errors per day out of 150, the simplest thing might be to plot trimmed means, or the range of the middle 95% of values, or something like that. It really depends on what value you want out of the plot.
If you are really concerned with the true max and true of a day's prices, then you have to deal with the outliers as outliers, and properly exclude them, probably using one of the outlier tests previously proposed ( data point is x% more than next point, or the last n points, or more than 5 standard deviations away from the daily mean). Another approach is to view what happens after the outlier. If it is an outlier, then it will have a sharp upturn followed by a sharp downturn.
If however you care about overall trend, plotting daily trimmed mean, median, 5% and 95% percentiles will portray history well.
Choose your display methods and how much outlier detection you need to do based on the analysis question. If you care about medians or percentiles, they're probably irrelevant.