MATLab Bootstrap without for loop - matlab

Question

yesterday I implemented my first bootstrap in MATLab. (and yes, I know, for loops are evil.):
%data is an mxn matrix where the data should be sampled per column but there
can be a NaNs Elements
%from the array (a column of data) n values are sampled nReps times
function result = bootstrap_std(data, n, nReps,quantil)
result = zeros(1,size(data,2));
for i=1:size(data,2)
bootstrap_data = zeros(n,nReps);
values = find(~isnan(data(:,i)));
if isempty(values)
bootstrap_data(:,:) = NaN;
else
for k=1:nReps
bootstrap_data(:,k) = datasample(data(values,i),n);
end
end
stat = zeros(1,nReps);
for k=1:nReps
stat(k) = nanstd(bootstrap_data(:,k));
end
sort(stat);
result(i) = quantile(stat,quantil);
end
end
As one can see, this version works columnwise. The algorithm does what it should but is really slow when the data size increaes. My question is now: Is it possible to implement this logic without using for loops? My problem is here that I could not find a version of datasample which does the sampling columnwise. Or is there a better function to use?
I am happy for any hint or idea how I can speed up this implementation.
Thanks and best regards!
stephan

Answer 1

The bottlenecks in your implementation are
The function spends a lot of time inside nanstd which is unnecessary since you exclude NaN values from your sample anyway.
There are a lot of functions that operate column-wise, but you spend time looping over the columns and calling them many times.
You make many calls to datasample which is a relatively slow function. It's much faster to create a random vector of indices using randi and use that instead.
Here's how I would write the function (actually I probably wouldn't put in this many comments, and I wouldn't use so many temp variables, but I'm doing it now so you can see what all the steps of the computation are).
function result = bootstrap_std_new(data, n, nRep, quantil)
result = zeros(1, size(data,2));
for i = 1:size(data,2)
isbad = isnan(data(:,i)); %// Vector of NaN values
if all(isbad)
result(i) = NaN;
else
data0 = data(~isbad, i); %// Temp copy of this column for indexing
index = randi(size(data0,1), n, nRep); %// Create the indexing vector
bootstrapdata = data0(index); %// Sample the data
stdevs = std(bootstrapdata); %// Stdev of sampled data
result(i) = quantile(stdevs, quantil); %// Find the correct quantile
end
end
end
Here are some timings
>> data = randn(100,10);
>> data(randi(1000, 50, 1)) = NaN;
>> tic, bootstrap_std(data, 50, 1000, 0.5); toc
Elapsed time is 1.359529 seconds.
>> tic, bootstrap_std_new(data, 50, 1000, 0.5); toc
Elapsed time is 0.038558 seconds.
So this gives you about a 35x speedup.

Answer 2

Your main issue seems to be that you may have varying numbers/positions of NaN in each column, so can't work on the full matrix unless you're okay with also sampling NaNs. However, some of the inner loops could be simplified.
for k=1:nReps
bootstrap_data(:,k) = datasample(data(values,i),n);
end
Since you're sampling with replacement, you should be able to just do:
bootstrap_data = datasample(data(values,i), n*nReps);
bootstrap_data = reshape(bootstrap_data, [n nReps]);
Also nanstd can work on a full matrix so no need to loop:
stat = nanstd(bootstrap_data); % or nanstd(x,0,2) to change dimension
It would also be worth just looking over your code with profile to see where the bottlenecks are.