I have a density function f_N which is defined as follows (K_nu(z) is the modified Bessel function):
I want to compute the following integral for each value of N:
The following is the implementation of the above in matlab.
for N=1:100
syms z
f =#(z) (1/(gamma(N)*sqrt(pi))*(z/2).^(N-0.5).*besselk(0.5-N,z));
g = #(z) f(z).*log(f(z));
val=integral(g,0,Inf);
But when I run the above code, it's always returning NaN for varoious values of N with the following warning:
Warning: Infinite or Not-a-Number value encountered
Can someone suggest a simple way to do this or avoid this issue?
I don't think you are doing what you think you are doing. Your declaration of z as a symbol will get overridden by the function handle definition. That means the integral is not a symbolic one, but a numeric one. So what you simply need to do is to drop the function handle notation "#(z)" and do the integral symbolically...
My guess, without thoroughly analysing this, is that one of the points in you integration domain [0,inf] yields a value f (x)=inf, which would destroy a numeric integration technique, but perhaps not a symbolic one.
I'm working on an script that uses sym functions within a loop, because of the way my functions are defined. Also I need to use their derivatives. I cannot just write down the explicit matlab function for each, so defining each individual function and derivatives is not an option.
the code is this:
[out]=sym_script(n)
syms x;
out=[];
for i=1:n
Function=sin(x)+i*x;
out=[out Some_operation(Function,vec)];
end
(min example, actual sym function more complicated ) the problem is that matlab seems to be unable to overwrite Function if it is syms.
I have tried the script in Matlab 2015a for pc and mac and get the same error in both.
Never mind the trouble was inside other function I called in the loop. It had a variable named "diff" which caused conflict with the matlab's function diff() to calculate derivatives.
Lets say, I have a function 'x' and a function '2sin(x)'
How do I output the intersects, i.e. the roots in MATLAB? I can easily plot the two functions and find them that way but surely there must exist an absolute way of doing this.
If you have two analytical (by which I mean symbolic) functions, you can define their difference and use fzero to find a zero, i.e. the root:
f = #(x) x; %defines a function f(x)
g = #(x) 2*sin(x); %defines a function g(x)
%solve f==g
xroot = fzero(#(x)f(x)-g(x),0.5); %starts search from x==0.5
For tricky functions you might have to set a good starting point, and it will only find one solution even if there are multiple ones.
The constructs seen above #(x) something-with-x are called anonymous functions, and they can be extended to multivariate cases as well, like #(x,y) 3*x.*y+c assuming that c is a variable that has been assigned a value earlier.
When writing the comments, I thought that
syms x; solve(x==2*sin(x))
would return the expected result. At least in Matlab 2013b solve fails to find a analytic solution for this problem, falling back to a numeric solver only returning one solution, 0.
An alternative is
s = feval(symengine,'numeric::solve',2*sin(x)==x,x,'AllRealRoots')
which is taken from this answer to a similar question. Besides using AllRealRoots you could use a numeric solver, manually setting starting points which roughly match the values you have read from the graph. This wa you get precise results:
[fzero(#(x)f(x)-g(x),-2),fzero(#(x)f(x)-g(x),0),fzero(#(x)f(x)-g(x),2)]
For a higher precision you could switch from fzero to vpasolve, but fzero is probably sufficient and faster.
I need to take derivatives in Matlab of a lot of equations w.r.t. generic functions, which will provide me with generic derivatives, of the type:
diff(f(x,y),x)
or
D([1],f(x,y)).
What I need is to transform these derivatives into actual symbolic variables, in order to be able to use solve, etc. What I am doing now, but which is highly inefficient, is brute force string replacement. Here is a minimal working example of what I am doing:
syms x y
f(x,y) = sym('f(x,y)')
jacobian(f)
first_d = jacobian(f)
strrep(char(first_d),'D([1], f)(x, y)','fx')
In my real application, I have lots of derivatives to take from lots of equations, so looping such replacements is not the smartest thing to do. Can anybody shed some light into a more efficient solution?
Note: I'm using R2014b. Symbolic Math functionality has changed greatly in recent versions and continues to do so. Users on different versions may need to do slightly different things to achieve the results below, which relies on accessing undocumented functionality.
First, since this is about performance, it is sufficient to simply declare
syms f(x,y)
which also defines x and y as symbolic variables.
As I mention in my comments above, Matlab/MuPAD's symbolic math is all about manipulating strings. Doing this more directly and and adding in you own knowledge of the problem can help speed things up. You want to avoid unnecessary conversions between strings and the sym/symfun types.
1. The first thing to do is investigate how a particular symbolic math function is handling input and output and what lower level private functions it is calling. In the case of your jacobian function example, type edit jacobian in your command window to view the code in the Editor. Much of what you see may be confusing, but you should see this line:
res = mupadmex('symobj::jacobian',Fsym.s,v.s);
This calls the low level 'symobj::jacobian' function and passes in string versions of the function and variables. To call this yourself, you can do (this also assumes you know your variables are x and y):
syms f(x,y)
first_d = mupadmex('symobj::jacobian',char(f),char([x,y]))
This returns [ diff(f(x, y), x), diff(f(x, y), y)]. The undocumented mupadmex function is a direct way of calling MuPAD function from within Matlab – there are others, which are documented.
2. You'll notice that that the first_d output above is symfun class. We actually don't want want the output to be converted back to a symbolic function. To avoid this, we can pass an addition argument to mupadmex:
syms f(x,y)
first_d = mupadmex('symobj::jacobian',char(f),char([x,y]),0)
with now returns the string matrix([[diff(f(x, y), x), diff(f(x, y), y)]]). (I only know this trick of adding the additional 0 argument from having browsed through a lot of Symbolic Math toolbox code.)
3. From this string, we can now find and replace various patterns for partial derivatives with simple variables. The strrep function that you're using is generally a good choice for this. It is much faster than regexprep. However, if you have a large number of different, but similar, patterns to replace, you might do a performance comparison between the two. That would probably be the subject of a separate question.
I'm not sure what your overall goal is or the full extent of your problem, but here is my final code for your example:
syms f(x,y)
first_d = mupadmex('symobj::jacobian',char(f),char([x,y]),0)
first_d = strrep(first_d(9:end-2),'diff(f(x, y), x)','fx');
first_d = sym(strrep(first_d,'diff(f(x, y), y)','fy'));
This returns the symbolic vector [ fx, fy]. If you want a symfun, you'll need to modify the last line slightly. In some simple testing, this basic example is about 10% faster than calling jacobian and converting the result back to a string. If you directly specify the inputs as strings instead of allocating a symbolic function, the result is about 30% faster then your original:
first_d = mupadmex('symobj::jacobian','f(x,y)','[x,y]',0)
first_d = strrep(first_d(9:end-2),'diff(f(x, y), x)','fx');
first_d = sym(strrep(first_d,'diff(f(x, y), y)','fy'));
Using subs, as in this answer, while convenient, is the slowest approach. Converting back and forth to and from strings is costly.
I have been working on solving some equation in a more complicated context. However, I want to illustrate my question through the following simple example.
Consider the following two functions:
function y=f1(x)
y=1-x;
end
function y=f2(x)
if x<0
y=0;
else
y=x;
end
end
I want to solve the following equation: f1(x)=f2(x). The code I used is:
syms x;
x=solve(f1(x)-f2(x));
And I got the following error:
??? Error using ==> sym.sym>notimplemented at 2621
Function 'lt' is not implemented for MuPAD symbolic objects.
Error in ==> sym.sym>sym.lt at 812
notimplemented('lt');
Error in ==> f2 at 3
if x<0
I know the error is because x is a symbolic variable and therefore I could not compare x with 0 in the piecewise function f2(x).
Is there a way to fix this and solve the equation?
First, make sure symbolic math is even the appropriate solution method for your problem. In many cases it isn't. Look at fzero and fsolve amongst many others. A symbolic method is only needed if, for example, you want a formula or if you need to ensure precision.
In such an old version of Matlab, you may want to break up your piecewise function into separate continuous functions and solve them separately:
syms x;
s1 = solve(1-x^2,x) % For x >= 0
s2 = solve(1-x,x) % For x < 0
Then you can either manually examine or numerically compare the outputs to determine if any or all of the solutions are valid for the chosen regime – something like this:
s = [s1(double(s1) >= 0);s2(double(s2) < 0)]
You can also take advantage of the heaviside function, which is available in much older versions.
syms x;
f1 = 1-x;
f2 = x*heaviside(x);
s = solve(f1-f2,x)
Yes, the Heaviside function is 0.5 at zero – this gives it the appropriate mathematical properties. You can shift it to compare values other than zero. This is a standard technique.
In Matlab R2012a+, you can take advantage of assumptions in addition to the normal relational operators. To add to #AlexB's comment, you should convert the output of any logical comparison to symbolic before using isAlways:
isAlways(sym(x<0))
In your case, x is obviously not "always" on one side or the other of zero, but you may still find this useful in other cases.
If you want to get deep into Matlab's symbolic math, you can create piecewise functions using MuPAD, which are accessible from Matlab – e.g., see my example here.