I have been looking for a Matlab function that can do a nonlinear total least square fit, basically fit a custom function to data which has errors in all dimensions. The easiest case being x and y data-points with different given standard deviations in x and y, for every single point. This is a very common scenario in all natural sciences and just because most people only know how to do a least square fit with errors in y does not mean it wouldn't be extremely useful. I know the problem is far more complicated than a simple y-error, this is probably why most (not even physicists like myself) learned how to properly do this with multidimensional errors.
I would expect that a software like matlab could do it but unless I'm bad at reading the otherwise mostly useful help pages I think even a 'full' Matlab license doesn't provide such fitting functionality. Other tools like Origin, Igor, Scipy use the freely available fortran package "ODRPACK95", for instance. There are few contributions about total least square or deming fits on the file exchange, but they're for linear fits only, which is of little use to me.
I'd be happy for any hint that can help me out
kind regards
First I should point out that I haven't practiced MATLAB much since I graduated last year (also as a Physicist). That being said, I remember using
lsqcurvefit()
in MATLAB to perform non-linear curve fits. Now, this may, or may not work depending on what you mean by custom function? I'm assuming you want to fit some known expression similar to one of these,
y = A*sin(x)+B
y = A*e^(B*x) + C
It is extremely difficult to perform a fit without knowning the form, e.g. as above. Ultimately, all mathematical functions can be approximated by polynomials for small enough intervals. This is something you might want to consider, as MATLAB does have lots of tools for doing polynomial regression.
In the end, I would acutally reccomend you to write your own fit-function. There are tons of examples for this online. The idea is to know the true solution's form as above, and guess on the parameters, A,B,C.... Create an error- (or cost-) function, which produces an quantitative error (deviation) between your data and the guessed solution. The problem is then reduced to minimizing the error, for which MATLAB has lots of built-in functionality.
Related
I would like to calculate a Confidence Interval along with my Degrees of Freedom (DOF) estimation in Matlab. I am trying to run the following line of code:
[R, DoF, ciDOF] = copulafit('t', U); % fit the copula
The code line without the "ciDOF" arguments takes between 1-3 hours to run with my data. I tried to run the code with the "ciDOF" argument several times, but the calculations seem to take very long (I stopped the calculation after 8 hours). No error message is generated.
Does anyone have experience with this argument and could kindly tell me how long I should expect the calculation to take (the size of my data is 167*19) and if I have specified the "ciDOF" argument correctly?
Many thanks for the help!
Carolin
If your data matrix U is of size 167 x 19, then what you are asking for is a copula-fit distribution dependent on 19-dimensions, making your copula a distribution in a 20-dimensional space with 19 dependent variables.
This is almost definitely why it is taking so long, because whether it is your intention or not, you are asking MATLAB to solve a minimization problem of taking 19 marginal distributions and come-up with the 19-variate joint distribution (the copula) where each marginal distribution (represented by 167 x 1 row-vectors) is uniform.
Most-likely this is a limit of the MATLAB implementation that is iterating through many independent computations and then trying to combine them together to fit the joint distribution's ideal conditions.
First and foremost -- and not to be insulting or insinuating -- you should definitely check that you really are trying to find a 19-variate copula. Also, just in case, make sure that your matrix U is oriented in the proper way, because if you have it transposed, you could be trying to ask for the solution to a 167-variate distribution.
But, if this is what you are actually trying to do, there is not really an easy way to predict how long it will take or how long it should take. Even with multiple dimensions, if your marginals are simple or uniform already, that would greatly reduce the copula computation. But, really, there is no way to tell.
Although this may seem like a cop-out, you may actually have better luck switching from MATLAB to R, especially if you have a lot of multivariate data, and you will probably find a lot more functionality in R than MATLAB. R is freely available and comes with a Graphical User Interface (GUI), in-case you aren't comfortable with command-line programming.
There are many more sources, but here is one PDF lecture on computing copula-fits in R:
http://faculty.washington.edu/ezivot/econ589/copulasPowerpoint.pdf
I have a curve which looks roughly / qualitative like the curves displayed in those 3 images.
The only thing I know is that the first part of the curve is hardware-specific supposed to be a linear curve and the second part is some sort of logarithmic part (might be a combination of two logarithmic curves), i.e. linlog camera. But I couldn't tell the mathematic structure of the equation, e.g. wether it looks like a*log(b)+c or a*(log(c+b))^2 etc. Is there a way to best fit/find out a good regression for this type of curve and is there a certain way to do this specifically in MATLAB? :-) I've got the student version, i.e. all toolboxes etc.
fminsearch is a very general way to find best-fit parameters once you have decided on a parametric equation. And the optimization toolbox has a range of more-sophisticated ways.
Comparing the merits of one parametric equation against another, however, is a deep topic. The main thing to be aware of is that you can always tweak the equation, adding another term or parameter or whatever, and get a better fit in terms of lower sum-squared-error or whatever other goodness-of-fit metric you decide is appropriate. That doesn't mean it's a good thing to keep adding parameters: your solution might be becoming overly complex. In the end the most reliable way to compare how well two different parametric models are doing is to cross-validate: optimize the parameters on a subset of the data, and evaluate only on data that the optimization procedure has not yet seen.
You can try the "function finder" on my curve fitting web site zunzun.com and see what it comes up with - it is free. If you have any trouble please email me directly and I'll do my best to help.
James Phillips
zunzun#zunzun.com
I have 3 sets of data: xdata, ydata and error_ydata.
I need to fit this data according to a equation like this:
y_fit = c1*sin((2*pi*x_data)/c2 - c3) + c4
where c are constants, and the parameters to find.
I've tried several matlab functions like fittype or lsqcurvefit but they require very close initial estimates for the 4 constants to work. The point was to find these constants whichever are the initial estimates you give.
Any idea?
Thank you in advance.
My best regards
Sorry, but the fact is, nonlinear estimation requires at least decent starting values. If you can't bother to supply them, then expect at least some of the time random crapola for results.
Do those tools require VERY close estimates? Hardly so IMHO, but the definition of "very" is a highly subjective one. Perhaps you need to learn more about optimization and the tools that you will use. Once you do, you will start to know how to make them work better. A workman who lacks understanding of their tools should expect to get hurt on a frequent basis.
You might do some reading. Here is one place to start.
There ARE some tools out there that allow a reduction of the problem using a partitioned least squares approach. fminspleas is one. (You can also find pleas in the optimization toips and tricks file.). But in order to use that tool, you will need to learn something about its estimation methodology, understanding how it splits the parameters into two classes. Again, understand your tools.
I've got a problem with my equation that I try to solve numerically using both MATLAB and Symbolic Toolbox. I'm after several source pages of MATLAB help, picked up a few tricks and tried most of them, still without satisfying result.
My goal is to solve set of three non-polynomial equations with q1, q2 and q3 angles. Those variables represent joint angles in my industrial manipulator and what I'm trying to achieve is to solve inverse kinematics of this model. My set of equations looks like this: http://imgur.com/bU6XjNP
I'm solving it with
numeric::solve([z1,z2,z3], [q1=x1..x2,q2=x3..x4,q3=x5..x6], MultiSolutions)
Changing the xn constant according to my needs. Yet I still get some odd results, the q1 var is off by approximately 0.1 rad, q2 and q3 being off by ~0.01 rad. I don't have much experience with numeric solve, so I just need information, should it supposed to look like that?
And, if not, what valid option do you suggest I should take next? Maybe transforming this equation to polynomial, maybe using a different toolbox?
Or, if trying to do this in Matlab, how can you limit your solutions when using solve()? I'm thinking of an equivalent to Symbolic Toolbox's assume() and assumeAlso.
I would be grateful for your help.
The numerical solution of a system of nonlinear equations is generally taken as an iterative minimization process involving the minimization (i.e., finding the global minimum) of the norm of the difference of left and right hand sides of the equations. For example fsolve essentially uses Newton iterations. Those methods perform a "deterministic" optimization: they start from an initial guess and then move in the unknowns space essentially according to the opposite of the gradient until the solution is not found.
You then have two kinds of issues:
Local minima: the stopping rule of the iteration is related to the gradient of the functional. When the gradient becomes small, the iterations are stopped. But the gradient can become small in correspondence to local minima, besides the desired global one. When the initial guess is far from the actual solution, then you are stucked in a false solution.
Ill-conditioning: large variations of the unknowns can be reflected into large variations of the data. So, small numerical errors on data (for example, machine rounding) can lead to large variations of the unknowns.
Due to the above problems, the solution found by your numerical algorithm will be likely to differ (even relevantly) from the actual one.
I recommend that you make a consistency test by choosing a starting guess, for example when using fsolve, very close to the actual solution and verify that your final result is accurate. Then you will discover that, by making the initial guess more far away from the actual solution, your result will be likely to show some (even large) errors. Of course, the entity of the errors depend on the nature of the system of equations. In some lucky cases, those errors could keep also very small.
I need to construct an interpolating function from a 2D array of data. The reason I need something that returns an actual function is, that I need to be able to evaluate the function as part of an expression that I need to numerically integrate.
For that reason, "interp2" doesn't cut it: it does not return a function.
I could use "TriScatteredInterp", but that's heavy-weight: my grid is equally spaced (and big); so I don't need the delaunay triangularisation.
Are there any alternatives?
(Apologies for the 'late' answer, but I have some suggestions that might help others if the existing answer doesn't help them)
It's not clear from your question how accurate the resulting function needs to be (or how big, 'big' is), but one approach that you could adopt is to regress the data points that you have using a least-squares or Kalman filter-based method. You'd need to do this with a number of candidate function forms and then choose the one that is 'best', for example by using an measure such as MAE or MSE.
Of course this requires some idea of what the form underlying function could be, but your question isn't clear as to whether you have this kind of information.
Another approach that could work (and requires no knowledge of what the underlying function might be) is the use of the fuzzy transform (F-transform) to generate line segments that provide local approximations to the surface.
The method for this would be:
Define a 2D universe that includes the x and y domains of your input data
Create a 2D fuzzy partition of this universe - chosing partition sizes that give the accuracy you require
Apply the discrete F-transform using your input data to generate fuzzy data points in a 3D fuzzy space
Pass the inverse F-transform as a function handle (along with the fuzzy data points) to your integration function
If you're not familiar with the F-transform then I posted a blog a while ago about how the F-transform can be used as a universal approximator in a 1D case: http://iainism-blogism.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/fuzzy-wuzzy-was.html
To see the mathematics behind the method and extend it to a multidimensional case then the University of Ostravia has published a PhD thesis that explains its application to various engineering problems and also provides an example of how it is constructed for the case of a 2D universe: http://irafm.osu.cz/f/PhD_theses/Stepnicka.pdf
If you want a function handle, why not define f=#(xi,yi)interp2(X,Y,Z,xi,yi) ?
It might be a little slow, but I think it should work.
If I understand you correctly, you want to perform a surface/line integral of 2-D data. There are ways to do it but maybe not the way you want it. I had the exact same problem and it's annoying! The only way I solved it was using the Surface Fitting Tool (sftool) to create a surface then integrating it.
After you create your fit using the tool (it has a GUI as well), it will generate an sftool object which you can then integrate in (2-D) using quad2d
I also tried your method of using interp2 and got the results (which were similar to the sfobject) but I had no idea how to do a numerical integration (line/surface) with the data. Creating thesfobject and then integrating it was much faster.
It was the first time I do something like this so I confirmed it using a numerically evaluated line integral. According to Stoke's theorem, the surface integral and the line integral should be the same and it did turn out to be the same.
I asked this question in the mathematics stackexchange, wanted to do a line integral of 2-d data, ended up doing a surface integral and then confirming the answer using a line integral!