Trying to Vectorise the following for time efficiency MATLAB - matlab

I am trying to optimize the time efficiency of the following MATLAB code, it currently takes in excess of 4 hours to run (I have preallocated the two structures just not included that part here):
for combination = 1:1771
for hankel_size = 1:4;
for window = 1:999
Output.bin_r(:, window, combination, hankel_size) = bsxfun(#minus, data.hankel_index_mean(window, combination ,hankel_size),centers(window, :, hankel)');
Output.score(window, combination, hankel_size) = probs(window, :, hankel_size)*Output.bin_r(:, window, combination, hankel_size);
end
end
end
Note that:
centers is a 999 x 50 x 4 matrix
hankel_index_mean is a 999 x 1771 x 4 matrix
probs is a 999 x 50 x 4 matrix
Thanks for your help in advance!

parfor combination = 1:1771
for hankel_size = 1:4;
for window = 1:999
Output.bin_r(:, window, combination, hankel_size) = bsxfun(#minus, data.hankel_index_mean(window, combination ,hankel_size),centers(window, :, hankel)');
Output.score(window, combination, hankel_size) = probs(window, :, hankel_size)*Output.bin_r(:, window, combination, hankel_size);
end
end
end
parfor utilises all the cores in your CPU.
Open a parallel pool by either the matlab default which opens one on the calling of parallel functions (eg parfor or spmd) or open one explicitly by calling parpool or gcp.
Edit parallel preferences under Home->parallel->parallel preferences.

Related

Unable to write to matrix lines with parfor

How can I write into my result matrix lines using parfor?
Code sample:
xCount = 10;
yCount = 20;
area = xCount*yCount;
PP = nan(area,3);
parfor x = 1:10
for y = 1:20
id = y + (x-1)*yCount; % global PP line id.
z = x^2+y*10; % my stuff to get Z.
PP(id,:) = [x y z]; % write to PP line
end
end
The PARFOR loop cannot run due to the way variable 'PP' is used.
I actually says "Valid indices are restricted within PARFOR loops". The reason it says that it that MATLAB iterates through a parfor loop non-consecutive, meaning it can do iterations in semi-random order like 5 2 4 1 3, as opposed to 1 2 3 4 5. This means that in order to know where in PP MATLAB has to store your result, it wants to know before entering the parallel environment that no lines get called by different iterations, as to avoid conflicts when getting results back from the workers.
The solution will be to structure PP in such a way that it's known beforehand where the indices are stores, e.g. by creating a 2D array to use before the loop to store stuff in:
xCount = 10;
yCount = 20;
area = xCount*yCount;
PP(xCount,yCount) = 0;
y=1:yCount;
parfor x = 1:xCount
z = x^2+y.*10; % my stuff to get Z.
PP(x,:) = z; % write to PP line
end
%// Go to the [x y z] format
PP = [repmat((1:yCount).',xCount,1),repmat((1:xCount).',yCount,1), PP(:)];
I'd personally not do the last line in this case, since it stores three doubles for each useful value (z), whilst in the 2D matrix that comes out of the loop it only stores 1 double which can be indexed by simply reading PP(x,y). Thus it costs you 3 times the memory to store the same amount of useful data.

Apply function to rolling window

Say I have a long list A of values (say of length 1000) for which I want to compute the std in pairs of 100, i.e. I want to compute std(A(1:100)), std(A(2:101)), std(A(3:102)), ..., std(A(901:1000)).
In Excel/VBA one can easily accomplish this by writing e.g. =STDEV(A1:A100) in one cell and then filling down in one go. Now my question is, how could one accomplish this efficiently in Matlab without having to use any expensive for-loops.
edit: Is it also possible to do this for a list of time series, e.g. when A has dimensions 1000 x 4 (i.e. 4 time series of length 1000)? The output matrix should then have dimensions 901 x 4.
Note: For the fastest solution see Luis Mendo's answer
So firstly using a for loop for this (especially if those are your actual dimensions) really isn't going to be expensive. Unless you're using a very old version of Matlab, the JIT compiler (together with pre-allocation of course) makes for loops inexpensive.
Secondly - have you tried for loops yet? Because you should really try out the naive implementation first before you start optimizing prematurely.
Thirdly - arrayfun can make this a one liner but it is basically just a for loop with extra overhead and very likely to be slower than a for loop if speed really is your concern.
Finally some code:
n = 1000;
A = rand(n,1);
l = 100;
for loop (hardly bulky, likely to be efficient):
S = zeros(n-l+1,1); %//Pre-allocation of memory like this is essential for efficiency!
for t = 1:(n-l+1)
S(t) = std(A(t:(t+l-1)));
end
A vectorized (memory in-efficient!) solution:
[X,Y] = meshgrid(1:l)
S = std(A(X+Y-1))
A probably better vectorized solution (and a one-liner) but still memory in-efficient:
S = std(A(bsxfun(#plus, 0:l-1, (1:l)')))
Note that with all these methods you can replace std with any function so long as it is applies itself to the columns of the matrix (which is the standard in Matlab)
Going 2D:
To go 2D we need to go 3D
n = 1000;
k = 4;
A = rand(n,k);
l = 100;
ind = bsxfun(#plus, permute(o:n:(k-1)*n, [3,1,2]), bsxfun(#plus, 0:l-1, (1:l)')); %'
S = squeeze(std(A(ind)));
M = squeeze(mean(A(ind)));
%// etc...
OR
[X,Y,Z] = meshgrid(1:l, 1:l, o:n:(k-1)*n);
ind = X+Y+Z-1;
S = squeeze(std(A(ind)))
M = squeeze(mean(A(ind)))
%// etc...
OR
ind = bsxfun(#plus, 0:l-1, (1:l)'); %'
for t = 1:k
S = std(A(ind));
M = mean(A(ind));
%// etc...
end
OR (taken from Luis Mendo's answer - note in his answer he shows a faster alternative to this simple loop)
S = zeros(n-l+1,k);
M = zeros(n-l+1,k);
for t = 1:(n-l+1)
S(t,:) = std(A(k:(k+l-1),:));
M(t,:) = mean(A(k:(k+l-1),:));
%// etc...
end
What you're doing is basically a filter operation.
If you have access to the image processing toolbox,
stdfilt(A,ones(101,1)) %# assumes that data series are in columns
will do the trick (no matter the dimensionality of A). Note that if you also have access to the parallel computing toolbox, you can let filter operations like these run on a GPU, although your problem might be too small to generate noticeable speedups.
To minimize number of operations, you can exploit the fact that the standard deviation can be computed as a difference involving second and first moments,
and moments over a rolling window are obtained efficiently with a cumulative sum (using cumsum):
A = randn(1000,4); %// random data
N = 100; %// window size
c = size(A,2);
A1 = [zeros(1,c); cumsum(A)];
A2 = [zeros(1,c); cumsum(A.^2)];
S = sqrt( (A2(1+N:end,:)-A2(1:end-N,:) ...
- (A1(1+N:end,:)-A1(1:end-N,:)).^2/N) / (N-1) ); %// result
Benchmarking
Here's a comparison against a loop based solution, using timeit. The loop approach is as in Dan's solution but adapted to the 2D case, exploting the fact that std works along each column in a vectorized manner.
%// File loop_approach.m
function S = loop_approach(A,N);
[n, p] = size(A);
S = zeros(n-N+1,p);
for k = 1:(n-N+1)
S(k,:) = std(A(k:(k+N-1),:));
end
%// File bsxfun_approach.m
function S = bsxfun_approach(A,N);
[n, p] = size(A);
ind = bsxfun(#plus, permute(0:n:(p-1)*n, [3,1,2]), bsxfun(#plus, 0:n-N, (1:N).')); %'
S = squeeze(std(A(ind)));
%// File cumsum_approach.m
function S = cumsum_approach(A,N);
c = size(A,2);
A1 = [zeros(1,c); cumsum(A)];
A2 = [zeros(1,c); cumsum(A.^2)];
S = sqrt( (A2(1+N:end,:)-A2(1:end-N,:) ...
- (A1(1+N:end,:)-A1(1:end-N,:)).^2/N) / (N-1) );
%// Benchmarking code
clear all
A = randn(1000,4); %// Or A = randn(1000,1);
N = 100;
t_loop = timeit(#() loop_approach(A,N));
t_bsxfun = timeit(#() bsxfun_approach(A,N));
t_cumsum = timeit(#() cumsum_approach(A,N));
disp(' ')
disp(['loop approach: ' num2str(t_loop)])
disp(['bsxfun approach: ' num2str(t_bsxfun)])
disp(['cumsum approach: ' num2str(t_cumsum)])
disp(' ')
disp(['bsxfun/loop gain factor: ' num2str(t_loop/t_bsxfun)])
disp(['cumsum/loop gain factor: ' num2str(t_loop/t_cumsum)])
Results
I'm using Matlab R2014b, Windows 7 64 bits, dual core processor, 4 GB RAM:
4-column case:
loop approach: 0.092035
bsxfun approach: 0.023535
cumsum approach: 0.0002338
bsxfun/loop gain factor: 3.9106
cumsum/loop gain factor: 393.6526
Single-column case:
loop approach: 0.085618
bsxfun approach: 0.0040495
cumsum approach: 8.3642e-05
bsxfun/loop gain factor: 21.1431
cumsum/loop gain factor: 1023.6236
So the cumsum-based approach seems to be the fastest: about 400 times faster than the loop in the 4-column case, and 1000 times faster in the single-column case.
Several functions can do the job efficiently in Matlab.
On one side, you can use functions such as colfilt or nlfilter, which performs computations on sliding blocks. colfilt is way more efficient than nlfilter, but can be used only if the order of the elements inside a block does not matter. Here is how to use it on your data:
S = colfilt(A, [100,1], 'sliding', #std);
or
S = nlfilter(A, [100,1], #std);
On your example, you can clearly see the difference of performance. But there is a trick : both functions pad the input array so that the output vector has the same size as the input array. To get only the relevant part of the output vector, you need to skip the first floor((100-1)/2) = 49 first elements, and take 1000-100+1 values.
S(50:end-50)
But there is also another solution, close to colfilt, more efficient. colfilt calls col2im to reshape the input vector into a matrix on which it applies the given function on each distinct column. This transforms your input vector of size [1000,1] into a matrix of size [100,901]. But colfilt pads the input array with 0 or 1, and you don't need it. So you can run colfilt without the padding step, then apply std on each column and this is easy because std applied on a matrix returns a row vector of the stds of the columns. Finally, transpose it to get a column vector if you want. In brief and in one line:
S = std(im2col(X,[100 1],'sliding')).';
Remark: if you want to apply a more complex function, see the code of colfilt, line 144 and 147 (for v2013b).
If your concern is speed of the for loop, you can greatly reduce the number of loop iteration by folding your vector into an array (using reshape) with the columns having the number of element you want to apply your function on.
This will let Matlab and the JIT perform the optimization (and in most case they do that way better than us) by calculating your function on each column of your array.
You then reshape an offseted version of your array and do the same. You will still need a loop but the number of iteration will only be l (so 100 in your example case), instead of n-l+1=901 in a classic for loop (one window at a time).
When you're done, you reshape the array of result in a vector, then you still need to calculate manually the last window, but overall it is still much faster.
Taking the same input notation than Dan:
n = 1000;
A = rand(n,1);
l = 100;
It will take this shape:
width = (n/l)-1 ; %// width of each line in the temporary result array
tmp = zeros( l , width ) ; %// preallocation never hurts
for k = 1:l
tmp(k,:) = std( reshape( A(k:end-l+k-1) , l , [] ) ) ; %// calculate your stat on the array (reshaped vector)
end
S2 = [tmp(:) ; std( A(end-l+1:end) ) ] ; %// "unfold" your results then add the last window calculation
If I tic ... toc the complete loop version and the folded one, I obtain this averaged results:
Elapsed time is 0.057190 seconds. %// windows by window FOR loop
Elapsed time is 0.016345 seconds. %// "Folded" FOR loop
I know tic/toc is not the way to go for perfect timing but I don't have the timeit function on my matlab version. Besides, the difference is significant enough to show that there is an improvement (albeit not precisely quantifiable by this method). I removed the first run of course and I checked that the results are consistent with different matrix sizes.
Now regarding your "one liner" request, I suggest your wrap this code into a function like so:
function out = foldfunction( func , vec , nPts )
n = length( vec ) ;
width = (n/nPts)-1 ;
tmp = zeros( nPts , width ) ;
for k = 1:nPts
tmp(k,:) = func( reshape( vec(k:end-nPts+k-1) , nPts , [] ) ) ;
end
out = [tmp(:) ; func( vec(end-nPts+1:end) ) ] ;
Which in your main code allows you to call it in one line:
S = foldfunction( #std , A , l ) ;
The other great benefit of this format, is that you can use the very same sub function for other statistical function. For example, if you want the "mean" of your windows, you call the same just changing the func argument:
S = foldfunction( #mean , A , l ) ;
Only restriction, as it is it only works for vector as input, but with a bit of rework it could be made to take arrays as input too.

Solving a large system takes too much memory?

Suppose i have a sparse matrix M with the following properties:
size(M) -> 100000 100000
sprank(M) -> 99236
nnz(M) -> 499987
numel(M) -> 1.0000e+10
How come solving the system takes way more than 8GB of RAM? whos('M') gives only 8.4mb.
I'm using the following code (provided at http://www.mathworks.com/moler/exm/chapters/pagerank.pdf)
function x = pagerank(G,p)
G = G - diag(diag(G));
[n,n] = size(G);
c = full(sum(G,1));
r = full(sum(G,2));
% Scale column sums to be 1 (or 0 where there are no out links).
k = find(c~=0);
D = sparse(k,k,1./c(k),n,n);
% Solve (I - p*G*D)*x = e
e = ones(n,1);
I = speye(n,n);
x = (I - p*G*D)\e;
% Normalize so that sum(x) == 1.
x = x/sum(x);`
Left divide! that x = (I - p*G*D)\e does way more things that what it seems!
From Matlab mldivide for sparse matrices:
Not all the solvers take the same amount of memory, and some of them take a lot. Left dividing in Matlab is fantastic, but you need to know what you are doing.
I suggest to have a look to some iterative solvers if you run out of memory, such as Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PGC) or Algebraic Multigrid (AMG) or in case of complex numbers I think Biconjugate gradients stabilized method works fine
If you dont know where to start, I highly recommend PGC. In the project I am working on my code for left dividing is something like:
% CAUTION! PSEUDOCODE! do not try to run
try
x=A\b
catch
x=pgc(A,b)
end

Break vector into pieces and parallelly applying function on them in Matlab?

I am new to matlab and I do not know how to vectorize the following:
I have a large vector (think 30000) and I want to partition it into pieces of unequal length, specified by row indices into the vector. I have a function, which I want to apply to said peices parallelly(using parfor or otherwise), and stitch back the results.
Is there an efficient way to do this? any pointers will help.
First, run parpool to initialize a parallel pool in MATLAB (you need the parallel processing toolbox) to get some workers. Then use parfor to run a for loop in parallel by having each worker execute the loop at the same time. There are a few rules, such as each iteration in the loop cannot depend on or use results from the previous iteration.
Consider the following code:
% Run parpool first
n = 100000;
data = (1:n)';
myIndices = 1:5:n;
numSections = length(myIndices) -1;
f = #(x) mean(x);
outputMatrix = zeros(numSections,1);
% TRy changing this to parfor or just for and run a few times to see
% average time:
tic
parfor ind = 1:numSections
if ind == 1
myStart = 1;
else
myStart = myIndices(ind)+1;
end
myEnd = myIndices(ind+1);
outputCell{ind} = f(data(myStart:myEnd));
outputMatrix(ind) = f(data(myStart:myEnd));
end
toc
% convert cell array to matrix
output = cell2mat(outputCell);
Here I show how to collect in a cell or a vector/matrix. It depends on what kind of function you are running on your data. Try changing the parfor to for and running a few times to see the speed difference.
I chose to divide the data into even blocks of size 5 but you could change this to be whatever you want by making myIndices be arbitrary values.

How can I speed up this call to quantile in Matlab?

I have a MATLAB routine with one rather obvious bottleneck. I've profiled the function, with the result that 2/3 of the computing time is used in the function levels:
The function levels takes a matrix of floats and splits each column into nLevels buckets, returning a matrix of the same size as the input, with each entry replaced by the number of the bucket it falls into.
To do this I use the quantile function to get the bucket limits, and a loop to assign the entries to buckets. Here's my implementation:
function [Y q] = levels(X,nLevels)
% "Assign each of the elements of X to an integer-valued level"
p = linspace(0, 1.0, nLevels+1);
q = quantile(X,p);
if isvector(q)
q=transpose(q);
end
Y = zeros(size(X));
for i = 1:nLevels
% "The variables g and l indicate the entries that are respectively greater than
% or less than the relevant bucket limits. The line Y(g & l) = i is assigning the
% value i to any element that falls in this bucket."
if i ~= nLevels % "The default; doesnt include upper bound"
g = bsxfun(#ge,X,q(i,:));
l = bsxfun(#lt,X,q(i+1,:));
else % "For the final level we include the upper bound"
g = bsxfun(#ge,X,q(i,:));
l = bsxfun(#le,X,q(i+1,:));
end
Y(g & l) = i;
end
Is there anything I can do to speed this up? Can the code be vectorized?
If I understand correctly, you want to know how many items fell in each bucket.
Use:
n = hist(Y,nbins)
Though I am not sure that it will help in the speedup. It is just cleaner this way.
Edit : Following the comment:
You can use the second output parameter of histc
[n,bin] = histc(...) also returns an index matrix bin. If x is a vector, n(k) = >sum(bin==k). bin is zero for out of range values. If x is an M-by-N matrix, then
How About this
function [Y q] = levels(X,nLevels)
p = linspace(0, 1.0, nLevels+1);
q = quantile(X,p);
Y = zeros(size(X));
for i = 1:numel(q)-1
Y = Y+ X>=q(i);
end
This results in the following:
>>X = [3 1 4 6 7 2];
>>[Y, q] = levels(X,2)
Y =
1 1 2 2 2 1
q =
1 3.5 7
You could also modify the logic line to ensure values are less than the start of the next bin. However, I don't think it is necessary.
I think you shoud use histc
[~,Y] = histc(X,q)
As you can see in matlab's doc:
Description
n = histc(x,edges) counts the number of values in vector x that fall
between the elements in the edges vector (which must contain
monotonically nondecreasing values). n is a length(edges) vector
containing these counts. No elements of x can be complex.
I made a couple of refinements (including one inspired by Aero Engy in another answer) that have resulted in some improvements. To test them out, I created a random matrix of a million rows and 100 columns to run the improved functions on:
>> x = randn(1000000,100);
First, I ran my unmodified code, with the following results:
Note that of the 40 seconds, around 14 of them are spent computing the quantiles - I can't expect to improve this part of the routine (I assume that Mathworks have already optimized it, though I guess that to assume makes an...)
Next, I modified the routine to the following, which should be faster and has the advantage of being fewer lines as well!
function [Y q] = levels(X,nLevels)
p = linspace(0, 1.0, nLevels+1);
q = quantile(X,p);
if isvector(q), q = transpose(q); end
Y = ones(size(X));
for i = 2:nLevels
Y = Y + bsxfun(#ge,X,q(i,:));
end
The profiling results with this code are:
So it is 15 seconds faster, which represents a 150% speedup of the portion of code that is mine, rather than MathWorks.
Finally, following a suggestion of Andrey (again in another answer) I modified the code to use the second output of the histc function, which assigns entries to bins. It doesn't treat the columns independently, so I had to loop over the columns manually, but it seems to be performing really well. Here's the code:
function [Y q] = levels(X,nLevels)
p = linspace(0,1,nLevels+1);
q = quantile(X,p);
if isvector(q), q = transpose(q); end
q(end,:) = 2 * q(end,:);
Y = zeros(size(X));
for k = 1:size(X,2)
[junk Y(:,k)] = histc(X(:,k),q(:,k));
end
And the profiling results:
We now spend only 4.3 seconds in codes outside the quantile function, which is around a 500% speedup over what I wrote originally. I've spent a bit of time writing this answer because I think it's turned into a nice example of how you can use the MATLAB profiler and StackExchange in combination to get much better performance from your code.
I'm happy with this result, although of course I'll continue to be pleased to hear other answers. At this stage the main performance increase will come from increasing the performance of the part of the code that currently calls quantile. I can't see how to do this immediately, but maybe someone else here can. Thanks again!
You can sort the columns and divide+round the inverse indexes:
function Y = levels(X,nLevels)
% "Assign each of the elements of X to an integer-valued level"
[S,IX]=sort(X);
[grid1,grid2]=ndgrid(1:size(IX,1),1:size(IX,2));
invIX=zeros(size(X));
invIX(sub2ind(size(X),IX(:),grid2(:)))=grid1;
Y=ceil(invIX/size(X,1)*nLevels);
Or you can use tiedrank:
function Y = levels(X,nLevels)
% "Assign each of the elements of X to an integer-valued level"
R=tiedrank(X);
Y=ceil(R/size(X,1)*nLevels);
Surprisingly, both these solutions are slightly slower than the quantile+histc solution.