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.
Related
I'm quite new to biostatistics so I apologize if my question is too dumb.
I'm studying data transformation in biostatistics to fit my data to the normal distribution.
I started with the Poisson distribution (which is quite common in the biostatistics: daily admissions, prevalence of rare disease etc) It is recommended to use the square root to fit data to normal distribution.
I used stata and this free dataset ( https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/martj42/international-football-results-from-1872-to-2017?resource=download ) with the results of a huge amount of football matches.
I have created a new variable for this dataset, made by the whole amount of goals scored by both teams in each match. You will find that as the independent variable distributed as following:
We can see that the distribution quite approximate the Poisson's one, as confirmed by the values of mean and std deviation.
Then, I've created a new variable with the square root of this variable and the distribution is the following (blue line is how the normal distrib with the same mean and std deviation looks like):
As you can see It's quite far from a normal distribution of my data, as proven by normality tests, but also easily visible from the q-q plot:
So, my question is, why sqrt didn't work? What can I do to transform my dataset to fit the normal distribution?
So I have two subsets of data that represent two situations. The one that look more consistent needs to be filtered out (they are noise) while the one looks random are kept (they are motions). The method I was using was to define a moving window = 10 and whenever the standard deviation of the data within the window was smaller than some threshold, I suppressed them. However, this method could not filter out all "consistent" noise while also hurting the inconsistent one (real motion). I was hoping to use some kinds of statistical models and not machine learning to accomplish this. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
noise
real motion
The Kolmogorov–Smirnov test is used to compare two samples to determine if they come from the same distribution. I realized that real world data would never be uniform. So instead of comparing my noise data against the uniform distribution, I used scipy.stats.ks_2samp function to compare any bursts against one real motion burst. I then muted the motion if the return p-value is significantly small, meaning I can reject the hypothesis that two samples are from the same distribution.
Good afternoon,
I know that the traditional independent t-test assumes homoscedasticity (i.e., equal variances across groups) and normality of the residuals.
They are usually checked by using levene's test for homogeneity of variances, and the shapiro-wilk test and qqplots for the normality assumption.
Which statistical assumptions do I have to check with the bayesian independent t test? How may I check them in R with coda and rjags?
For whichever test you want to run, find the formula and plug in using the posterior draws of the parameters you have, such as the variance parameter and any regression coefficients that the formula requires. Iterating the formula over the posterior draws will give you a range of values for the test statistic from which you can take the mean to get an average value and the sd to get a standard deviation (uncertainty estimate).
And boom, you're done.
There might be non-parametric Bayesian t-tests. But commonly, Bayesian t-tests are parametric, and as such they assume equality of relevant population variances. If you could obtain a t-value from a t-test (just a regular t-test for your type of t-test from any software package you're comfortable with), use levene's test (do not think this in any way is a dependable test, remember it uses p-value), then you can do a Bayesian t-test. But remember the point that the Bayesian t-test, requires a conventional modeling of observations (Likelihood), and an appropriate prior for the parameter of interest.
It is highly recommended that t-tests be re-parameterized in terms of effect sizes (especially standardized mean difference effect sizes). That is, you focus on the Bayesian estimation of the effect size arising from the t-test not other parameter in the t-test. If you opt to estimate Effect Size from a t-test, then a very easy to use free, online Bayesian t-test software is THIS ONE HERE (probably one of the most user-friendly package available, note that this software uses a cauchy prior for the effect size arising from any type of t-test).
Finally, since you want to do a Bayesian t-test, I would suggest focusing your attention on picking an appropriate/defensible/meaningful prior rather then levenes' test. No test could really show that the sample data may have come from two populations (in your case) that have had equal variances or not unless data is plentiful. Note that the issue that sample data may have come from populations with equal variances itself is an inferential (Bayesian or non-Bayesian) question.
I've been looking through the Matlab documention on using quasi-random sampling of N-dimensional unit cubes. This represents a problem with N stochastic parameters. Based on the fact that it is a unit cube, I presume that I need to use the inverse CDF of each parameter to map from the [0,1] domain to the value range of each parameter.
I would like to try this on a problem for which I now use Monte Carlo. Unfortunately, the problem I'm analyzing does not have a fixed number of dimensions. For each instantiation of the problem, I generate a variable number of widgets (say) using a Poisson distribution. Only after that do I randomly generate the parameters for each widget. That whole process yields one instance of the problem to be analyzed, so the number of parameters varies from one instance to the next.
Is this kind of problem still amenable to Quasi-Monte-Carlo?
What I used once was to get highest possible dimension of the problem d, generate Sobol sequence in d and use whatever number of points necessary for a particular sampling. I would say it helped somewhat...
From talking to a much smarter colleague, we need to consider the various combinations of widget counts for each widget type. For example, if we have 2 of widget type#1, 4 of widget type #2, 1 of widget type #3, etc., that constitutes one combination. QMC can be applied to that one combination. We are assuming that number of widget#i is independent of the number of widget#j for i<>j, so the probability of each combination is just the product of p(2 widgets of type#1), p(4 widgets of type#2), p(1 widget of type#3), etc. The individual probabilities are easy to get from their Poisson distributions (or their flat distributions, or whatever distribution is being used). If there are N widget types, this is just a joint PMF in N-space. This probability is then used to weight the QMC result for that particular combination. Note that even when the exactly combination is nailed down, QMC is still needed because there each widget is associated with 3 stochastic parameters.
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.