I have an array of values, with that values I plotted the histogram.I want to know the corresponding distribution from the histogram obtained. How is it possible.
Could you please explain the steps in obtaining appropriate probability distribution from histogram.
You'd better to ask this question in stats.stackexchange.com as it is more about the method than the programming. However, one thing that you can do is to fit a parametric distribution (using moment matching or maximum likelihood for example) then compare the fitted distribution to the normalized histogram using KL divergence or Bhattacharyya distance.
One option might be to use the "Distribution Fitting App" in the Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox. That should help you evaluate if your data seems like it might have been drawn from some common distributions. You may never know for sure, since multiple distributions could account for the data, but if you have a lot of data it might help you narrow it down.
I think that in many cases an eye-ball comparison is enough. With a reasonable amount of data, it is quite difficult to not be able to distinguish between a gaussian or a weibull or...
I would use fitdist or fithist to eye-ball different distributions.
If you have no idea at all on the distribution and you want to know if two datasets are distributed differently it could be useful to compare their distributions by obtaining them with the option 'kernel'
Related
I am trying to fit a custom distribution to a large (~O(500,000) measurements) dataset using scipy. I have derived a theoretical PDF based on some other factors, but both by hand and using symbolic integration software I cannot find an exact form of the CDF.
Currently, simply evaluating 1000 random samples from my custom distribution is expensive, which I believe is due to the need to invert an unknown CDF. If I cannot find an explicit form of the CDF and it's inverse, is there anything else I can do to speed up usage of this distribution?
I've used maple, matlab and Sympy to try and determine a CDF, yet none give a result. I also tried down-sampling my data whilst still retaining the tail attributes, but this still required so much data that doing anything with the distribution was slow.
My distribution is a sub-class of SciPy's rv_continuous class.
Thanks for any advice.
This sounds like you want to sample from a Kernel Density Estimation of the probability distribution. While Scipy does offer a Gaussian Kernel package, for that many measurements you would be much better off using sklearn's implementation. A good resource with code examples can be found on Jake VanderPlas's blog.
I want to produce a figure like the following one (found in a paper)
I think it is done using histfit
However, histfit doesen't really work with my data. The bars exceed the curve. My data is not really normally distributed but I want all the bins to be inside the curve except some outliers. Is there any way to fit a gaussian and plot it like in the above figure?
Edit
This is what histfit(data)has given
I want to fit a gaussian to it and keep some values as ouliers. I need to only use a normal distribution as it is going to be used in a Kalman filter based on the assumption that the data is normally distributed. The fact that is not really normally distributed will certainly affect the performance of the filter but I have to feed it first with the parameters of a normal distribution , i.e mean and std.
I'm not sure you understand how a fit works, if your data is kinda gaussian the function will plot the fitted curve based on the values, some bars will be above some below, it all depends on how the least squares are minimized over the entire curve. you can't force the fit to look different, this is the result of the fitting process. If your data is not normally distributed then the goodness of the fit is poor. without having more info or data, this is the best I can answer :)
I would like to create a tool for generating a stochastic time-series distribution, for which I can provide the parameters (for a normal distribution) the mean, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis. There is a similar question here using R, but I am not able to interpret this and put it in MATLAB.
Is there something that someone knows can do this already? (I haven't been able to find anything)
If not, what would be some good advice for starting something of my own? Any known useful functions? I would also like to be able to build upon it afterwards, for example: adding outliers, clusters of volatility, adjusting heteroscedasticity.
I realise me saying 'stochastic' and then in the same sentence 'given parameters' may seem odd, but it isn't - I want each time point to be random, but the parameters to describe, say 10,000 time points.
If you're looking for the equivalent of the solution in R, Matlab's Statistics Toolbox has limited support for the Johnson and Pearson distribution systems. In particular, the johnsrnd function produces random variates for the Johnson system. The Pearson system and pearsrnd, however, takes moments directly.
A big caveat. Using moments to describe or fit or produce random variates – often referred to as moment matching – is not robust and poorly regarded by statisticians. They're not guaranteed to uniquely define a distribution unless you have the entire moment generating function.
I've been looking around scipy and sklearn for clustering algorithms for a particular problem I have. I need some way of characterizing a population of N particles into k groups, where k is not necessarily know, and in addition to this, no a priori linking lengths are known (similar to this question).
I've tried kmeans, which works well if you know how many clusters you want. I've tried dbscan, which does poorly unless you tell it a characteristic length scale on which to stop looking (or start looking) for clusters. The problem is, I have potentially thousands of these clusters of particles, and I cannot spend the time to tell kmeans/dbscan algorithms what they should go off of.
Here is an example of what dbscan find:
You can see that there really are two separate populations here, though adjusting the epsilon factor (the max. distance between neighboring clusters parameter), I simply cannot get it to see those two populations of particles.
Is there any other algorithms which would work here? I'm looking for minimal information upfront - in other words, I'd like the algorithm to be able to make "smart" decisions about what could constitute a separate cluster.
I've found one that requires NO a priori information/guesses and does very well for what I'm asking it to do. It's called Mean Shift and is located in SciKit-Learn. It's also relatively quick (compared to other algorithms like Affinity Propagation).
Here's an example of what it gives:
I also want to point out that in the documentation is states that it may not scale well.
When using DBSCAN it can be helpful to scale/normalize data or
distances beforehand, so that estimation of epsilon will be relative.
There is a implementation of DBSCAN - I think its the one
Anony-Mousse somewhere denoted as 'floating around' - , which comes
with a epsilon estimator function. It works, as long as its not fed
with large datasets.
There are several incomplete versions of OPTICS at github. Maybe
you can find one to adapt it for your purpose. Still
trying to figure out myself, which effect minPts has, using one and
the same extraction method.
You can try a minimum spanning tree (zahn algorithm) and then remove the longest edge similar to alpha shapes. I used it with a delaunay triangulation and a concave hull:http://www.phpdevpad.de/geofence. You can also try a hierarchical cluster for example clusterfck.
Your plot indicates that you chose the minPts parameter way too small.
Have a look at OPTICS, which does no longer need the epsilon parameter of DBSCAN.
This might be a silly question! I have a array P which represents the probability distribution of some data e.g. [0;0.3;0.7] How can I determine the type or class of discrete probability distribution of P? The original data is unavailable to me.
dfittool or fitdist requires me to give the data as input, while I already have its probability distribution. Any ideas?
You probably might have seen different probability distributions during lecture or your reading. All you have to do is plotting the given distribution against the candidates. As the distributions itself are parametrized, curve fitting or trial end error come into play. The distribution with the least error, best fit, might be the one you are looking for.
It is not possible to find out a priori what kind of distribution some data (especially with as low n as in your example) is coming from.
If you have an idea of the process that generated your data, you might be able to get an idea of which distributions to test. Maybe your data comes from the family of gamma distributions, maybe your data comes from the family of Weibull distributions etc. Then, you can fit these general distributions and see whether they are likely to simplify to a more common distribution.
For a visual representation of how well your data could approximate a certain distribution, you can use PROBPLOT.
Once you have identified possible distributions, you can fit them to the data and use the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) to compare which fit describes the data best. Note that unless you have huge numbers of noise-free data, it is impossible to tell which fit is correct if you have several possible distributions with comparatively low BIC.