Robust higher statistical moments in IDL - statistics

I'm working with noisy data in IDL, so I've been using STDDEV and robust_sigma
. There are papers on robust skewness and kurtosis, for instance [1] and [2], but are there implementations, as for standard deviation? (in IDL or maybe C?)

The documentation of http://idlastro.gsfc.nasa.gov/ftp/pro/robust/robust_sigma.pro states:
; OPTIONAL OUPTUT KEYWORD:
; GOODVEC = Vector of non-trimmed indices of the input vector
So one calls robust_sigma with an extra parameter that keeps track of the "good indices" in the data, those used to compute the robust_sigma, as opposed to those ignored in its computation.
good_indices = lonarr(width)
robo_2 = robust_sigma(data[*], GOODVEC=good_indices)
Then use (only) those good indices to compute the other moments.
robo_3 = skewness(data[good_indices])
robo_4 = kurtosis(data[good_indices])
No need for a special implementation.

Related

Word2Vec Subsampling -- Implementation

I am implementing the Skipgram model, both in Pytorch and Tensorflow2. I am having doubts about the implementation of subsampling of frequent words. Verbatim from the paper, the probability of subsampling word wi is computed as
where t is a custom threshold (usually, a small value such as 0.0001) and f is the frequency of the word in the document. Although the authors implemented it in a different, but almost equivalent way, let's stick with this definition.
When computing the P(wi), we can end up with negative values. For example, assume we have 100 words, and one of them appears extremely more often than others (as it is the case for my dataset).
import numpy as np
import seaborn as sns
np.random.seed(12345)
# generate counts in [1, 20]
counts = np.random.randint(low=1, high=20, size=99)
# add an extremely bigger count
counts = np.insert(counts, 0, 100000)
# compute frequencies
f = counts/counts.sum()
# define threshold as in paper
t = 0.0001
# compute probabilities as in paper
probs = 1 - np.sqrt(t/f)
sns.distplot(probs);
Q: What is the correct way to implement subsampling using this "probability"?
As an additional info, I have seen that in keras the function keras.preprocessing.sequence.make_sampling_table takes a different approach:
def make_sampling_table(size, sampling_factor=1e-5):
"""Generates a word rank-based probabilistic sampling table.
Used for generating the `sampling_table` argument for `skipgrams`.
`sampling_table[i]` is the probability of sampling
the i-th most common word in a dataset
(more common words should be sampled less frequently, for balance).
The sampling probabilities are generated according
to the sampling distribution used in word2vec:
```
p(word) = (min(1, sqrt(word_frequency / sampling_factor) /
(word_frequency / sampling_factor)))
```
We assume that the word frequencies follow Zipf's law (s=1) to derive
a numerical approximation of frequency(rank):
`frequency(rank) ~ 1/(rank * (log(rank) + gamma) + 1/2 - 1/(12*rank))`
where `gamma` is the Euler-Mascheroni constant.
# Arguments
size: Int, number of possible words to sample.
sampling_factor: The sampling factor in the word2vec formula.
# Returns
A 1D Numpy array of length `size` where the ith entry
is the probability that a word of rank i should be sampled.
"""
gamma = 0.577
rank = np.arange(size)
rank[0] = 1
inv_fq = rank * (np.log(rank) + gamma) + 0.5 - 1. / (12. * rank)
f = sampling_factor * inv_fq
return np.minimum(1., f / np.sqrt(f))
I tend to trust deployed code more than paper write-ups, especially in a case like word2vec, where the original authors' word2vec.c code released by the paper's authors has been widely used & served as the template for other implementations. If we look at its subsampling mechanism...
if (sample > 0) {
real ran = (sqrt(vocab[word].cn / (sample * train_words)) + 1) * (sample * train_words) / vocab[word].cn;
next_random = next_random * (unsigned long long)25214903917 + 11;
if (ran < (next_random & 0xFFFF) / (real)65536) continue;
}
...we see that those words with tiny counts (.cn) that could give negative values in the original formula instead here give values greater-than 1.0, and thus can never be less than the long-random-masked-and-scaled to never be more than 1.0 ((next_random & 0xFFFF) / (real)65536). So, it seems the authors' intent was for all negative-values of the original formula to mean "never discard".
As per the keras make_sampling_table() comment & implementation, they're not consulting the actual word-frequencies at all. Instead, they're assuming a Zipf-like distribution based on word-rank order to synthesize a simulated word-frequency.
If their assumptions were to hold – the related words are from a natural-language corpus with a Zipf-like frequency-distribution – then I'd expect their sampling probabilities to be close to down-sampling probabilities that would have been calculated from true frequency information. And that's probably "close enough" for most purposes.
I'm not sure why they chose this approximation. Perhaps other aspects of their usual processes have not maintained true frequencies through to this step, and they're expecting to always be working with natural-language texts, where the assumed frequencies will be generally true.
(As luck would have it, and because people often want to impute frequencies to public sets of word-vectors which have dropped the true counts but are still sorted from most- to least-frequent, just a few days ago I wrote an answer about simulating a fake-but-plausible distribution using Zipf's law – similar to what this keras code is doing.)
But, if you're working with data that doesn't match their assumptions (as with your synthetic or described datasets), their sampling-probabilities will be quite different than what you would calculate yourself, with any form of the original formula that uses true word frequencies.
In particular, imagine a distribution with one token a million times, then a hundred tokens all appearing just 10 times each. Those hundred tokens' order in the "rank" list is arbitrary – truly, they're all tied in frequency. But the simulation-based approach, by fitting a Zipfian distribution on that ordering, will in fact be sampling each of them very differently. The one 10-occurrence word lucky enough to be in the 2nd rank position will be far more downsampled, as if it were far more frequent. And the 1st-rank "tall head" value, by having its true frequency *under-*approximated, will be less down-sampled than otherwise. Neither of those effects seem beneficial, or in the spirit of the frequent-word-downsampling option - which should only "thin out" very-frequent words, and in all cases leave words of the same frequency as each other in the original corpus roughly equivalently present to each other in the down-sampled corpus.
So for your case, I would go with the original formula (probability-of-discarding-that-requires-special-handling-of-negative-values), or the word2vec.c practical/inverted implementation (probability-of-keeping-that-saturates-at-1.0), rather than the keras-style approximation.
(As a totally-separate note that nonetheless may be relevant for your dataset/purposes, if you're using negative-sampling: there's another parameter controlling the relative sampling of negative examples, often fixed at 0.75 in early implementations, that one paper has suggested can usefully vary for non-natural-language token distributions & recommendation-related end-uses. This parameter is named ns_exponent in the Python gensim implementation, but simply a fixed power value internal to a sampling-table pre-calculation in the original word2vec.c code.)

Parallelization of Piecewise Polynomial Evaluation

I am trying to evaluate points in a large piecewise polynomial, which is obtained from a cubic-spline. This takes a long time to do and I would like to speed it up.
As such, I would like to evaluate a points on a piecewise polynomial with parallel processes, rather than sequentially.
Code:
z = zeros(1e6, 1) ; % preallocate some memory for speed
Y = rand(11220,161) ; %some data, rand for generating a working example
X = 0 : 0.0125 : 2 ; % vector of data sites
pp = spline(X, Y) ; % get the piecewise polynomial form of the cubic spline.
The resulting structure is large.
for t = 1 : 1e6 % big number
hcurrent = ppval(pp,t); %evaluate the piecewise polynomial at t
z(t) = sum(x(t:t+M-1).*hcurrent,1) ; % do some operation of the interpolated value. Most likely not relevant to this question.
end
Unfortunately, with matrix form and using:
hcurrent = flipud(ppval(pp, 1: 1e6 ))
requires too much memory to process, so cannot be done. Is there a way that I can batch process this code to speed it up?
For scalar second arguments, as in your example, you're dealing with two issues. First, there's a good amount of function call overhead and redundant computation (e.g., unmkpp(pp) is called every loop iteration). Second, ppval is written to be general so it's not fully vectorized and does a lot of things that aren't necessary in your case.
Below is vectorized code code that take advantage of some of the structure of your problem (e.g., t is an integer greater than 0), avoids function call overhead, move some calculations outside of your main for loop (at the cost of a bit of extra memory), and gets rid of a for loop inside of ppval:
n = 1e6;
z = zeros(n,1);
X = 0:0.0125:2;
Y = rand(11220,numel(X));
pp = spline(X,Y);
[b,c,l,k,dd] = unmkpp(pp);
T = 1:n;
idx = discretize(T,[-Inf b(2:l) Inf]); % Or: [~,idx] = histc(T,[-Inf b(2:l) Inf]);
x = bsxfun(#power,T-b(idx),(k-1:-1:0).').';
idx = dd*idx;
d = 1-dd:0;
for t = T
hcurrent = sum(bsxfun(#times,c(idx(t)+d,:),x(t,:)),2);
z(t) = ...;
end
The resultant code takes ~34% of the time of your example for n=1e6. Note that because of the vectorization, calculations are performed in a different order. This will result in slight differences between outputs from ppval and my optimized version due to the nature of floating point math. Any differences should be on the order of a few times eps(hcurrent). You can still try using parfor to further speed up the calculation (with four already running workers, my system took just 12% of your code's original time).
I consider the above a proof of concept. I may have over-optmized the code above if your example doesn't correspond well to your actual code and data. In that case, I suggest creating your own optimized version. You can start by looking at the code for ppval by typing edit ppval in your Command Window. You may be able to implement further optimizations by looking at the structure of your problem and what you ultimately want in your z vector.
Internally, ppval still uses histc, which has been deprecated. My code above uses discretize to perform the same task, as suggested by the documentation.
Use parfor command for parallel loops. see here, also precompute z vector as z(j) = x(j:j+M-1) and hcurrent in parfor for speed up.
The Spline Parameters estimation can be written in Matrix form.
Once you write it in Matrix form and solve it you can use the Model Matrix to evaluate the Spline on all data point using Matrix Multiplication which is probably the most tuned operation in MATLAB.

Is there a language with constrainable types?

Is there a typed programming language where I can constrain types like the following two examples?
A Probability is a floating point number with minimum value 0.0 and maximum value 1.0.
type Probability subtype of float
where
max_value = 0.0
min_value = 1.0
A Discrete Probability Distribution is a map, where: the keys should all be the same type, the values are all Probabilities, and the sum of the values = 1.0.
type DPD<K> subtype of map<K, Probability>
where
sum(values) = 1.0
As far as I understand, this is not possible with Haskell or Agda.
What you want is called refinement types.
It's possible to define Probability in Agda: Prob.agda
The probability mass function type, with sum condition is defined at line 264.
There are languages with more direct refinement types than in Agda, for example ATS
You can do this in Haskell with Liquid Haskell which extends Haskell with refinement types. The predicates are managed by an SMT solver at compile time which means that the proofs are fully automatic but the logic you can use is limited by what the SMT solver handles. (Happily, modern SMT solvers are reasonably versatile!)
One problem is that I don't think Liquid Haskell currently supports floats. If it doesn't though, it should be possible to rectify because there are theories of floating point numbers for SMT solvers. You could also pretend floating point numbers were actually rational (or even use Rational in Haskell!). With this in mind, your first type could look like this:
{p : Float | p >= 0 && p <= 1}
Your second type would be a bit harder to encode, especially because maps are an abstract type that's hard to reason about. If you used a list of pairs instead of a map, you could write a "measure" like this:
measure total :: [(a, Float)] -> Float
total [] = 0
total ((_, p):ps) = p + probDist ps
(You might want to wrap [] in a newtype too.)
Now you can use total in a refinement to constrain a list:
{dist: [(a, Float)] | total dist == 1}
The neat trick with Liquid Haskell is that all the reasoning is automated for you at compile time, in return for using a somewhat constrained logic. (Measures like total are also very constrained in how they can be written—it's a small subset of Haskell with rules like "exactly one case per constructor".) This means that refinement types in this style are less powerful but much easier to use than full-on dependent types, making them more practical.
Perl6 has a notion of "type subsets" which can add arbitrary conditions to create a "sub type."
For your question specifically:
subset Probability of Real where 0 .. 1;
and
role DPD[::T] {
has Map[T, Probability] $.map
where [+](.values) == 1; # calls `.values` on Map
}
(note: in current implementations, the "where" part is checked at run-time, but since "real types" are checked at compile-time (that includes your classes), and since there are pure annotations (is pure) inside the std (which is mostly perl6) (those are also on operators like *, etc), it's only a matter of effort put into it (and it shouldn't be much more).
More generally:
# (%% is the "divisible by", which we can negate, becoming "!%%")
subset Even of Int where * %% 2; # * creates a closure around its expression
subset Odd of Int where -> $n { $n !%% 2 } # using a real "closure" ("pointy block")
Then you can check if a number matches with the Smart Matching operator ~~:
say 4 ~~ Even; # True
say 4 ~~ Odd; # False
say 5 ~~ Odd; # True
And, thanks to multi subs (or multi whatever, really – multi methods or others), we can dispatch based on that:
multi say-parity(Odd $n) { say "Number $n is odd" }
multi say-parity(Even) { say "This number is even" } # we don't name the argument, we just put its type
#Also, the last semicolon in a block is optional
Nimrod is a new language that supports this concept. They are called Subranges. Here is an example. You can learn more about the language here link
type
TSubrange = range[0..5]
For the first part, yes, that would be Pascal, which has integer subranges.
The Whiley language supports something very much like what you are saying. For example:
type natural is (int x) where x >= 0
type probability is (real x) where 0.0 <= x && x <= 1.0
These types can also be implemented as pre-/post-conditions like so:
function abs(int x) => (int r)
ensures r >= 0:
//
if x >= 0:
return x
else:
return -x
The language is very expressive. These invariants and pre-/post-conditions are verified statically using an SMT solver. This handles examples like the above very well, but currently struggles with more complex examples involving arrays and loop invariants.
For anyone interested, I thought I'd add an example of how you might solve this in Nim as of 2019.
The first part of the questions is straightfoward, since in the interval since since this question was asked, Nim has gained the ability to generate subrange types on floats (as well as ordinal and enum types). The code below defines two new float subranges types, Probability and ProbOne.
The second part of the question is more tricky -- defining a type with constrains on a function of it's fields. My proposed solution doesn't directly define such a type but instead uses a macro (makePmf) to tie the creation of a constant Table[T,Probability] object to the ability to create a valid ProbOne object (thus ensuring that the PMF is valid). The makePmf macro is evaluated at compile time, ensuring that you can't create an invalid PMF table.
Note that I'm a relative newcomer to Nim so this may not be the most idiomatic way to write this macro:
import macros, tables
type
Probability = range[0.0 .. 1.0]
ProbOne = range[1.0..1.0]
macro makePmf(name: untyped, tbl: untyped): untyped =
## Construct a Table[T, Probability] ensuring
## Sum(Probabilities) == 1.0
# helper templates
template asTable(tc: untyped): untyped =
tc.toTable
template asProb(f: float): untyped =
Probability(f)
# ensure that passed value is already is already
# a table constructor
tbl.expectKind nnkTableConstr
var
totprob: Probability = 0.0
fval: float
newtbl = newTree(nnkTableConstr)
# create Table[T, Probability]
for child in tbl:
child.expectKind nnkExprColonExpr
child[1].expectKind nnkFloatLit
fval = floatVal(child[1])
totprob += Probability(fval)
newtbl.add(newColonExpr(child[0], getAst(asProb(fval))))
# this serves as the check that probs sum to 1.0
discard ProbOne(totprob)
result = newStmtList(newConstStmt(name, getAst(asTable(newtbl))))
makePmf(uniformpmf, {"A": 0.25, "B": 0.25, "C": 0.25, "D": 0.25})
# this static block will show that the macro was evaluated at compile time
static:
echo uniformpmf
# the following invalid PMF won't compile
# makePmf(invalidpmf, {"A": 0.25, "B": 0.25, "C": 0.25, "D": 0.15})
Note: A cool benefit of using a macro is that nimsuggest (as integrated into VS Code) will even highlight attempts to create an invalid Pmf table.
Modula 3 has subrange types. (Subranges of ordinals.) So for your Example 1, if you're willing to map probability to an integer range of some precision, you could use this:
TYPE PROBABILITY = [0..100]
Add significant digits as necessary.
Ref: More about subrange ordinals here.

Modelica Time Dependent Equations

I am new to Modelica, and I am wondering if it is possible to write a kind of dynamic programming equation. Assume time is discretized by an integer i, and in my specific application x is boolean and f is a boolean function of x.
x(t_i) = f(x(t_{i+d}))
Where d can be a positive or negative integer. Of course, I would initialize x accordingly, either true or false.
Any help or references would be greatly appreciated!
It is possible. In Modelica the discretization in time is usually carried on by the compiler, you have to take care of the equations (continous dynamics). Otherwise, if you want to generate events at discrete time points, you can do it using when statements.
I suggest you to take a look at Introduction to Object-Oriented Modeling and Simulation with OpenModelica (PDF format, 6.6 MB) - a more recent tutorial (2012) by Peter Fritzson. There is a section that on Discrete Events and Hybrid Systems, that should clarify how to implement your equations in Modelica.
Below you can find an example from that tutorial about the model of a bouncing ball, as you can see discretization in time is not considered when you write your dynamic equations. So the continous model of the ball v=der(s), a=der(v) and than the discrete part inside the when clause that handles the contact with the ground:
model BouncingBall "the bouncing ball model"
parameter Real g=9.81; //gravitational acc.
parameter Real c=0.90; //elasticity constant
Real height(start=10),velocity(start=0);
equation
der(height) = velocity;
der(velocity)=-g;
when height<0 then
reinit(velocity, -c*velocity);
end when;
end BouncingBall;
Hope this helps,
Marco
If I understand your question, you want to use the last n evaluations of x to determine the next value of x. If so, this code shows how to do this:
model BooleanHistory
parameter Integer n=10 "How many points to keep";
parameter Modelica.SIunits.Time dt=1e-3;
protected
Boolean x[n];
function f
input Integer n;
input Boolean past[n-1];
output Boolean next;
algorithm
next :=not past[1]; // Example
end f;
initial equation
x = {false for i in 1:n};
equation
when sample(0,dt) then
x[2:n] = pre(x[1:(n-1)]);
x[1] = f(n, x[2:n]);
end when;
end BooleanHistory;

Is it possible to do an algebraic curve fit with just a single pass of the sample data?

I would like to do an algebraic curve fit of 2D data points, but for various reasons - it isn't really possible to have much of the sample data in memory at once, and iterating through all of it is an expensive process.
(The reason for this is that actually I need to fit thousands of curves simultaneously based on gigabytes of data which I'm reading off disk, and which is therefore sloooooow).
Note that the number of polynomial coefficients will be limited (perhaps 5-10), so an exact fit will be extremely unlikely, but this is ok as I'm trying to find an underlying pattern in data with a lot of random noise.
I understand how one can use a genetic algorithm to fit a curve to a dataset, but this requires many passes through the sample data, and thus isn't practical for my application.
Is there a way to fit a curve with a single pass of the data, where the state that must be maintained from sample to sample is minimal?
I should add that the nature of the data is that the points may lie anywhere on the X axis between 0.0 and 1.0, but the Y values will always be either 1.0 or 0.0.
So, in Java, I'm looking for a class with the following interface:
public interface CurveFit {
public void addData(double x, double y);
public List<Double> getBestFit(); // Returns the polynomial coefficients
}
The class that implements this must not need to keep much data in its instance fields, no more than a kilobyte even for millions of data points. This means that you can't just store the data as you get it to do multiple passes through it later.
edit: Some have suggested that finding an optimal curve in a single pass may be impossible, however an optimal fit is not required, just as close as we can get it in a single pass.
The bare bones of an approach might be if we have a way to start with a curve, and then a way to modify it to get it slightly closer to new data points as they come in - effectively a form of gradient descent. It is hoped that with sufficient data (and the data will be plentiful), we get a pretty good curve. Perhaps this inspires someone to a solution.
Yes, it is a projection. For
y = X beta + error
where lowercased terms are vectors, and X is a matrix, you have the solution vector
\hat{beta} = inverse(X'X) X' y
as per the OLS page. You almost never want to compute this directly but rather use LR, QR or SVD decompositions. References are plentiful in the statistics literature.
If your problem has only one parameter (and x is hence a vector as well) then this reduces to just summation of cross-products between y and x.
If you don't mind that you'll get a straight line "curve", then you only need six variables for any amount of data. Here's the source code that's going into my upcoming book; I'm sure that you can figure out how the DataPoint class works:
Interpolation.h:
#ifndef __INTERPOLATION_H
#define __INTERPOLATION_H
#include "DataPoint.h"
class Interpolation
{
private:
int m_count;
double m_sumX;
double m_sumXX; /* sum of X*X */
double m_sumXY; /* sum of X*Y */
double m_sumY;
double m_sumYY; /* sum of Y*Y */
public:
Interpolation();
void addData(const DataPoint& dp);
double slope() const;
double intercept() const;
double interpolate(double x) const;
double correlate() const;
};
#endif // __INTERPOLATION_H
Interpolation.cpp:
#include <cmath>
#include "Interpolation.h"
Interpolation::Interpolation()
{
m_count = 0;
m_sumX = 0.0;
m_sumXX = 0.0;
m_sumXY = 0.0;
m_sumY = 0.0;
m_sumYY = 0.0;
}
void Interpolation::addData(const DataPoint& dp)
{
m_count++;
m_sumX += dp.getX();
m_sumXX += dp.getX() * dp.getX();
m_sumXY += dp.getX() * dp.getY();
m_sumY += dp.getY();
m_sumYY += dp.getY() * dp.getY();
}
double Interpolation::slope() const
{
return (m_sumXY - (m_sumX * m_sumY / m_count)) /
(m_sumXX - (m_sumX * m_sumX / m_count));
}
double Interpolation::intercept() const
{
return (m_sumY / m_count) - slope() * (m_sumX / m_count);
}
double Interpolation::interpolate(double X) const
{
return intercept() + slope() * X;
}
double Interpolation::correlate() const
{
return m_sumXY / sqrt(m_sumXX * m_sumYY);
}
Why not use a ring buffer of some fixed size (say, the last 1000 points) and do a standard QR decomposition-based least squares fit to the buffered data? Once the buffer fills, each time you get a new point you replace the oldest and re-fit. That way you have a bounded working set that still has some data locality, without all the challenges of live stream (memoryless) processing.
Are you limiting the number of polynomial coefficients (i.e. fitting to a max power of x in your polynomial)?
If not, then you don't need a "best fit" algorithm - you can always fit N data points EXACTLY to a polynomial of N coefficients.
Just use matrices to solve N simultaneous equations for N unknowns (the N coefficients of the polynomial).
If you are limiting to a max number of coefficients, what is your max?
Following your comments and edit:
What you want is a low-pass filter to filter out noise, not fit a polynomial to the noise.
Given the nature of your data:
the points may lie anywhere on the X axis between 0.0 and 1.0, but the Y values will always be either 1.0 or 0.0.
Then you don't need even a single pass, as these two lines will pass exactly through every point:
X = [0.0 ... 1.0], Y = 0.0
X = [0.0 ... 1.0], Y = 1.0
Two short line segments, unit length, and every point falls on one line or the other.
Admittedly, an algorithm to find a good curve fit for arbitrary points in a single pass is interesting, but (based on your question), that's not what you need.
Assuming that you don't know which point should belong to which curve, something like a Hough Transform might provide what you need.
The Hough Transform is a technique that allows you to identify structure within a data set. One use is for computer vision, where it allows easy identification of lines and borders within the field of sight.
Advantages for this situation:
Each point need be considered only once
You don't need to keep a data structure for each candidate line, just one (complex, multi-dimensional) structure
Processing of each line is simple
You can stop at any point and output a set of good matches
You never discard any data, so it's not reliant on any accidental locality of references
You can trade off between accuracy and memory requirements
Isn't limited to exact matches, but will highlight partial matches too.
An approach
To find cubic fits, you'd construct a 4-dimensional Hough space, into which you'd project each of your data-points. Hotspots within Hough space would give you the parameters for the cubic through those points.
You need the solution to an overdetermined linear system. The popular methods are Normal Equations (not usually recommended), QR factorization, and singular value decomposition (SVD). Wikipedia has decent explanations, Trefethen and Bau is very good. Your options:
Out-of-core implementation via the normal equations. This requires the product A'A where A has many more rows than columns (so the result is very small). The matrix A is completely defined by the sample locations so you don't have to store it, thus computing A'A is reasonably cheap (very cheap if you don't need to hit memory for the node locations). Once A'A is computed, you get the solution in one pass through your input data, but the method can be unstable.
Implement an out-of-core QR factorization. Classical Gram-Schmidt will be fastest, but you have to be careful about stability.
Do it in-core with distributed memory (if you have the hardware available). Libraries like PLAPACK and SCALAPACK can do this, the performance should be much better than 1. The parallel scalability is not fantastic, but will be fine if it's a problem size that you would even think about doing in serial.
Use iterative methods to compute an SVD. Depending on the spectral properties of your system (maybe after preconditioning) this could converge very fast and does not require storage for the matrix (which in your case has 5-10 columns each of which are the size of your input data. A good library for this is SLEPc, you only have to find a the product of the Vandermonde matrix with a vector (so you only need to store the sample locations). This is very scalable in parallel.
I believe I found the answer to my own question based on a modified version of this code. For those interested, my Java code is here.

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