Often I’d like to compare the runtime performance of multiple implementations of the same function. For individual inputs, criterion is a good tool.
But what is an easy way to plot the performance of the code over varying input size, e.g. to see the algorithmic complexity?
Ideally, I pass the library a value of type Benchmarkable r => [(String, Int -> r)], i.e. a list of size-dependent benchmarks, and the library will automatically find a the sensible input range for each value and creates a nice plot from it.
e.g. to see the algorithmic complexity?
There's a package for that:
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/complexity
However, I typically use QuickCheck to drive testing at random data sizes, then plot the result.
Related
In Maple, there is some feature that allows you to calculate the pdf of a function of a random variable. For example, if X is exponentially distributed, and you want to know the distribution of X^2, then there is a function that will do that for you.
My question is , is there a functionality in matlab that allows you to do so? I have looked through the matlab's guide, but I didn't see it.
The Statistics toolbox includes many probability distributions for you to choose from, both parametric and non-parametric distributions. For each it provides functions for PDF, CDF, fitting, random number generation, etc..
I suggest you start with the "Distribution Fitting app": dfittool.
EDIT:
In addition, MuPAD has support for a number of distributions, which you can manipulate symbolically. Example:
The function intlib::changevar might be of interest here, though it seems intended for integrals...
Also, if you're interested in getting the values of the PMF, or discrete PDF, then, given x some RV with some distribution,
my_pmf = hist(x)/sum(x);
So try,
doc hist
I need to use the SVD form of a matrix to extract concepts from a series of documents. My matrix is of the form A = [d1, d2, d3 ... dN] where di is a binary vector of M components. Then the svd decomposition gives me svd(A) = U x S x V' with S containing the singular values.
I use SVDLIBC to do the processing in nodejs (using a small module I wrote to use it). It seemed to work all well, but I noticed something quite weird in the running time behavior depending on the state of my matrix (where N, M are growing, but already above 1000 for each).
First, I didn't consider extracting the same document vectors, but now after some tests, it looks like adding a document twice sometimes speeds the processing extraordinarily.
Do I have to make sure that each of the columns of A are pairwise-independent? Are they required to be all linearly independent? (I thought nope, since SVD just seems to be performing its job well even with some columns being exactly the same, it will simply show in the resulting decomposition which columns / rows are useless by having 0 components in U or V)
Now that it sometimes takes way too much time to compute the SVD of my big matrix, I was trying to reduce its size by removing the same columns, but I found out that actually adding dummy same vectors can make it way faster. Is that normal? What's happening?
Logically, I'd say that I want my matrix to contain as much information as possible, and thus
[A] Remove all same columns, and in the best case, maybe
[B] Remove linearly dependent columns.
Doing [A] seems pretty simple and not computationally too expensive, I could hash my vectors at construction to check what are the possibly same vectors, and then spend time to check these, but are there good computation techniques for [A] and [B]?
(I'd appreciate for [A] to not have to check equality of a new vector with the whole past vectors the brute-force way, and as for [B], I don't know any good way to check it / do it).
Added related question: about my second question, why would SVD's running time behavior change so massively by just adding one similar column? Is that a normal possible behavior, or does it mean I should look for a bug in SVDLIBC?
It is difficult to say where the problem is without samples of fast and slow input matrices. But, since one of the primary uses of the SVD is to provide a rotation that eliminates covariance, redundant (or the same) columns should not cause problems.
To answer your question about if the slow behavior being a bug in the library you're using, I'd suggest trying to retrieve the SVD of the same matrix using another tool. For example, in Octave, retrieve an SVD of your matrix to compare runtimes:
[U, S, V] = svd(A)
I have a trading strategy on the foreign exchange market that I am attempting to improve upon.
I have a huge table (100k+ rows) that represent every possible trade in the market, the type of trade (buy or sell), the profit/loss after that trade closed, and 10 or so additional variables that represent various market measurements at the time of trade-opening.
I am trying to find out if any of these 10 variables are significantly related to the profits/losses.
For example, imagine that variable X ranges from 50 to -50.
The average value of X for a buy order is 25, and for a sell order is -25.
If most profitable buy orders have a value of X > 25, and most profitable sell orders have a value of X < -25 then I would consider the relationship of X-to-profit as significant.
I would like a good starting point for this. I have installed RapidMiner 5 in case someone can give me a specific recommendation for that.
A Decision Tree is perhaps the best place to begin.
The tree itself is a visual summary of feature importance ranking (or significant variables as phrased in the OP).
gives you a visual representation of the entire
classification/regression analysis (in the form of a binary tree),
which distinguishes it from any other analytical/statistical
technique that i am aware of;
decision tree algorithms require very little pre-processing on your data, no normalization, no rescaling, no conversion of discrete variables into integers (eg, Male/Female => 0/1); they can accept both categorical (discrete) and continuous variables, and many implementations can handle incomplete data (values missing from some of the rows in your data matrix); and
again, the tree itself is a visual summary of feature importance ranking
(ie, significant variables)--the most significant variable is the
root node, and is more significant than the two child nodes, which in
turn are more significant than their four combined children. "significance" here means the percent of variance explained (with respect to some response variable, aka 'target variable' or the thing
you are trying to predict). One proviso: from a visual inspection of
a decision tree you cannot distinguish variable significance from
among nodes of the same rank.
If you haven't used them before, here's how Decision Trees work: the algorithm will go through every variable (column) in your data and every value for each variable and split your data into two sub-sets based on each of those values. Which of these splits is actually chosen by the algorithm--i.e., what is the splitting criterion? The particular variable/value combination that "purifies" the data the most (i.e., maximizes the information gain) is chosen to split the data (that variable/value combination is usually indicated as the node's label). This simple heuristic is just performed recursively until the remaining data sub-sets are pure or further splitting doesn't increase the information gain.
What does this tell you about the "importance" of the variables in your data set? Well importance is indicated by proximity to the root node--i.e., hierarchical level or rank.
One suggestion: decision trees handle both categorical and discrete data usually without problem; however, in my experience, decision tree algorithms always perform better if the response variable (the variable you are trying to predict using all other variables) is discrete/categorical rather than continuous. It looks like yours is probably continuous, in which case in would consider discretizing it (unless doing so just causes the entire analysis to be meaningless). To do this, just bin your response variable values using parameters (bin size, bin number, and bin edges) meaningful w/r/t your problem domain--e.g., if your r/v is comprised of 'continuous values' from 1 to 100, you might sensibly bin them into 5 bins, 0-20, 21-40, 41-60, and so on.
For instance, from your Question, suppose one variable in your data is X and it has 5 values (10, 20, 25, 50, 100); suppose also that splitting your data on this variable with the third value (25) results in two nearly pure subsets--one low-value and one high-value. As long as this purity were higher than for the sub-sets obtained from splitting on the other values, the data would be split on that variable/value pair.
RapidMiner does indeed have a decision tree implementation, and it seems there are quite a few tutorials available on the Web (e.g., from YouTube, here and here). (Note, I have not used the decision tree module in R/M, nor have i used RapidMiner at all.)
The other set of techniques i would consider is usually grouped under the rubric Dimension Reduction. Feature Extraction and Feature Selection are two perhaps the most common terms after D/R. The most widely used is PCA, or principal-component analysis, which is based on an eigen-vector decomposition of the covariance matrix (derived from to your data matrix).
One direct result from this eigen-vector decomp is the fraction of variability in the data accounted for by each eigenvector. Just from this result, you can determine how many dimensions are required to explain, e.g., 95% of the variability in your data
If RapidMiner has PCA or another functionally similar dimension reduction technique, it's not obvious where to find it. I do know that RapidMiner has an R Extension, which of course let's you access R inside RapidMiner.R has plenty of PCA libraries (Packages). The ones i mention below are all available on CRAN, which means any of the PCA Packages there satisfy the minimum Package requirements for documentation and vignettes (code examples). I can recommend pcaPP (Robust PCA by Projection Pursuit).
In addition, i can recommend two excellent step-by-step tutorials on PCA. The first is from the NIST Engineering Statistics Handbook. The second is a tutorial for Independent Component Analysis (ICA) rather than PCA, but i mentioned it here because it's an excellent tutorial and the two techniques are used for the similar purposes.
I am trying to use Excel's (2007) built in FFT feature, however, it requires that I have 2^n data points - which I do not have.
I have tried two things, both give different results:
Pad the data values by zeros so that N (the number of data points) reach the closest power of 2
Use a divide-and-conquer approach i.e. if I have 112 data points, then I do a FFT for 64, then 32, then 16 (112=64+32+16)
Which is the better approach? I am comfortable writing VBA macros but I am looking for an algorithm which does not require the constraint of N being power of 2. Can anyone help?
Splitting your data into smaller bits will result in erroneous output, especially for smaller numbers of data points.
Padding with zeroes is a much better idea, and the general approach for FFTs. If you are interested in an alternative way of doing the FFT, octave will do it for you, and most of the Matlab documentation applies so you should have no trouble with it.
Padding with zeros is the right direction, but keep in mind that if you're doing the transform in order to estimate frequency content, you will need a window function, and that should be applied to the short block (i.e., if you have 2000 points, apply a 2000 point Hann window, then pad to 2048 and calculate the transform).
If you're developing an add-in, you might consider using one of the many FFT libraries out there. I'm a big fan of KISS FFT by Marc Borgerding. It offers fast transforms for many blocksizes, essentially any blocksize that can be factored into the numbers 2,3,4, and/or 5. It doesn't handle prime number sized blocks though. It's written in very plain C, so should be easy to port to C#. Or, this SO question suggests some libraries that can be used in .NET.
pad out with zeros
2^n is a requirement of the FFT algorithm.
Maybe a test of a known time series (e.g., simple sine or cosine of a single frequency). When you FFT that, you should get a single frequency (Dirac delta function). Anything else is an error. Do it with an integer power of two, padded with zeroes, etc.
You can pad with zeros, or you can use an FFT library that supports arbitrary sizes. One such library is https://github.com/altomani/XL-FFT.
It implements the FFT as a pure formula with LAMBDA functions (i.e. without any VBA code).
For power of two length it uses a recursive radix-2 Cooley-Tukey algorithm
and for other length a version of Bluestein's algorithm that reduces the calculation to a power of two case.
I am using Octave and I would like to use the anderson_darling_test from the Octave forge Statistics package to test if two vectors of data are drawn from the same statistical distribution. Furthermore, the reference distribution is unlikely to be "normal". This reference distribution will be the known distribution and taken from the help for the above function " 'If you are selecting from a known distribution, convert your values into CDF values for the distribution and use "uniform'. "
My question therefore is: how would I convert my data values into CDF values for the reference distribution?
Some background information for the problem: I have a vector of raw data values from which I extract the cyclic component (this will be the reference distribution); I then wish to compare this cyclic component with the raw data itself to see if the raw data is essentially cyclic in nature. If the the null hypothesis that the two are the same can be rejected I will then know that most of the movement in the raw data is not due to cyclic influences but is due to either trend or just noise.
If your data has a specific distribution, for instance beta(3,3) then
p = betacdf(x, 3, 3)
will be uniform by the definition of a CDF. If you want to transform it to a normal, you can just call the inverse CDF function
x=norminv(p,0,1)
on the uniform p. Once transformed, use your favorite test. I'm not sure I understand your data, but you might consider using a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test instead, which is a nonparametric test of distributional equality.
Your approach is misguided in multiple ways. Several points:
The Anderson-Darling test implemented in Octave forge is a one-sample test: it requires one vector of data and a reference distribution. The distribution should be known - not come from data. While you quote the help-file correctly about using a CDF and the "uniform" option for a distribution that is not built in, you are ignoring the next sentence of the same help file:
Do not use "uniform" if the distribution parameters are estimated from the data itself, as this sharply biases the A^2 statistic toward smaller values.
So, don't do it.
Even if you found or wrote a function implementing a proper two-sample Anderson-Darling or Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, you would still be left with a couple of problems:
Your samples (the data and the cyclic part estimated from the data) are not independent, and these tests assume independence.
Given your description, I assume there is some sort of time predictor involved. So even if the distributions would coincide, that does not mean they coincide at the same time-points, because comparing distributions collapses over the time.
The distribution of cyclic trend + error would not expected to be the same as the distribution of the cyclic trend alone. Suppose the trend is sin(t). Then it never will go above 1. Now add a normally distributed random error term with standard deviation 0.1 (small, so that the trend is dominant). Obviously you could get values well above 1.
We do not have enough information to figure out the proper thing to do, and it is not really a programming question anyway. Look up time series theory - separating cyclic components is a major topic there. But many reasonable analyses will probably be based on the residuals: (observed value - predicted from cyclic component). You will still have to be careful about auto-correlation and other complexities, but at least it will be a move in the right direction.