MATLAB: n-minute/hour/day averages of a time-series - matlab

This is a follow-up to an earlier question of mine posted here. Based on Oleg Komarov's answer I wrote a little tool to get daily, hourly, etc. averages or sums of my data that uses accumarray() and datevec()'s output structure. Feel free to have a look at it here (it's probably not written very well, but it works for me).
What I would like to do now is add the functionality to calculate n-minute, n-hour, n-day, etc. statistics instead of 1-minute, 1-hour, 1-day, etc. like my function does. I have a rough idea that simply loops over my time-vector t (which would be pretty much what I would have done already if I hadn't learnt about the beautiful accumarray()), but that means I have to do a lot of error-checking for data gaps, uneven sampling times, etc.
I wonder if there is a more elegant/efficient approach that lets me re-use/extend my old function posted above, i.e. something that still makes use of accumarray() and datevec(), since this makes working with gaps very easy.
You can download some sample data taken from my last question here. These were sampled at 30 min intervals, so a possible example of what I want to do would be to calculate 6 hour averages without relying on the assumption that they are free of gaps and/or always sampled at exactly 30 min.
This is what I have come up with so far, which works reasonably well, apart from a small but easily fixed problem with the time stamps (e.g. 0:30 is representative for the interval from 0:30 to 0:45 -- my old function suffers from the same problem, though):
[ ... see my answer below ...]
Thanks to woodchips for inspiration.

The linked method of using accumarray seems overkill and too complex to me if you start with evenly spaced measurements without any gaps. I have the following function in my private toolbox for calculating an N-point average of vectors:
function y = blockaver(x, n)
% y = blockaver(x, n)
% input points are averaged over n points
% always returns column vector
if n == 1
y = x(:);
else
nblocks = floor(length(x) / n);
y = mean(reshape(x(1:n * nblocks), n, nblocks), 1).';
end
Works pretty well for quick and dirty decimating by a factor N, but note that it does not apply proper anti-alias filtering. Use decimate if that is important.

I guess I figured it out using parts of #Bas Swinckels answer and #woodchip 's code linked above. Not exactly what I would call good code, but working and reasonably fast.
function [ t_acc, x_acc, subs ] = ts_aggregation( t, x, n, target_fmt, fct_handle )
% t is time in datenum format (i.e. days)
% x is whatever variable you want to aggregate
% n is the number of minutes, hours, days
% target_fmt is 'minute', 'hour' or 'day'
% fct_handle can be an arbitrary function (e.g. #sum)
t = t(:);
x = x(:);
switch target_fmt
case 'day'
t_factor = 1;
case 'hour'
t_factor = 1 / 24;
case 'minute'
t_factor = 1 / ( 24 * 60 );
end
t_acc = ( t(1) : n * t_factor : t(end) )';
subs = ones(length(t), 1);
for i = 2:length(t_acc)
subs(t > t_acc(i-1) & t <= t_acc(i)) = i;
end
x_acc = accumarray( subs, x, [], fct_handle );
end
/edit: Updated to a much shorter fnction that does use loops, but appears to be faster than my previous solution.

Related

MATLAB Piecewise function

I have to construct the following function in MATLAB and am having trouble.
Consider the function s(t) defined for t in [0,4) by
{ sin(pi*t/2) , for t in [0,1)
s(t) = { -(t-2)^3 , for t in [1,3)*
{ sin(pi*t/2) , for t in [3,4)
(i) Generate a column vector s consisting of 512 uniform
samples of this function over the interval [0,4). (This
is best done by concatenating three vectors.)
I know it has to be something of the form.
N = 512;
s = sin(5*t/N).' ;
But I need s to be the piecewise function, can someone provide assistance with this?
If I understand correctly, you're trying to create 3 vectors which calculate the specific function outputs for all t, then take slices of each and concatenate them depending on the actual value of t. This is inefficient as you're initialising 3 times as many vectors as you actually want (memory), and also making 3 times as many calculations (CPU), most of which will just be thrown away. To top it off, it'll be a bit tricky to use concatenate if your t is ever not as you expect (i.e. monotonically increasing). It might be an unlikely situation, but better to be general.
Here are two alternatives, the first is imho the nice Matlab way, the second is the more conventional way (you might be more used to that if you're coming from C++ or something, I was for a long time).
function example()
t = linspace(0,4,513); % generate your time-trajectory
t = t(1:end-1); % exclude final value which is 4
tic
traj1 = myFunc(t);
toc
tic
traj2 = classicStyle(t);
toc
end
function trajectory = myFunc(t)
trajectory = zeros(size(t)); % since you know the size of your output, generate it at the beginning. More efficient than dynamically growing this.
% you could put an assert for t>0 and t<3, otherwise you could end up with 0s wherever t is outside your expected range
% find the indices for each piecewise segment you care about
idx1 = find(t<1);
idx2 = find(t>=1 & t<3);
idx3 = find(t>=3 & t<4);
% now calculate each entry apprioriately
trajectory(idx1) = sin(pi.*t(idx1)./2);
trajectory(idx2) = -(t(idx2)-2).^3;
trajectory(idx3) = sin(pi.*t(idx3)./2);
end
function trajectory = classicStyle(t)
trajectory = zeros(size(t));
% conventional way: loop over each t, and differentiate with if-else
% works, but a lot more code and ugly
for i=1:numel(t)
if t(i)<1
trajectory(i) = sin(pi*t(i)/2);
elseif t(i)>=1 & t(i)<3
trajectory(i) = -(t(i)-2)^3;
elseif t(i)>=3 & t(i)<4
trajectory(i) = sin(pi*t(i)/2);
else
error('t is beyond bounds!')
end
end
end
Note that when I tried it, the 'conventional way' is sometimes faster for the sampling size you're working on, although the first way (myFunc) is definitely faster as you scale up really a lot. In anycase I recommend the first approach, as it is much easier to read.

Trying to calculate annual cycle

I'm trying to take 5 years of data from a netcdf file for a variable and create an annual cycle. So take all 5 Jans and average them, take all 5 Febs and average them, etc, and plot on a line graph. I'm just starting the code (I want to get this to work before I move on) and am getting the following error message of: In an assignment A(:) = B, the number of elements in A and B must be the same.
My question is, is there a better way to do this?
Thanks for your help in advance. I'm a newbie, so I know this may be a simple question.
ncid = netcdf.open('example.nc','NC_NOWRITE');
PS1 = netcdf.getVar(ncid,netcdf.inqVarID(ncid, 'ps'), 'single');
for i = 1:12
MonthlyPS1(i) = PS1(month==i);
end
That should dump data into bins for each month, where I can later calculate the average.
If PS1 is a 5-by-12 array of real numbers, then:
MonthlyPS1 = mean(PS1);
If PS1 is a 12-by-5 array of real numbers, then:
MonthlyPS1 = mean(PS1, 2);
If PS1 is a 60-by-1 array of real numbers, then:
MonthlyPS1 = mean(reshape(PS1, 12, 5), 2);
If PS1 is not an array of real numbers, you need to explain what PS1 is, as requested by CST-Link. Also, it is not clear what the variable month is.
I will try to write a solution, but I'm no sure it is what you need (there's a certain amount of guessing related to my answer).
Also I will not write it in Matlab-idiomatic code, but rather explicit loops and calculations; like this you may see easier if it's what you want or not:
% allocate space for monthly mean values
PS1_mean = zeros(size(PS1,1), size(PS1,2), 12)
for d = 1:size(PS1,3)
% calculate the month for date d
m = mod(d, 12);
if m == 0
m = 12;
end;
% cumulate the data
PS1_mean(:, :, m) = PS1_mean(:, :, m) + PS1(:, :, d);
end;
% calculate the mean value
% (this might be tricky for incomplete years)
n_years = fix(size(PS1,3) / 12);
PS1_mean = PS1_mean / n_years;
To plot a "slice" of data for e.g. March, you may try:
mesh(PS1_mean(:,:,3));
Again, I hope that's what you're looking for.

Sampling and DTFT in Matlab

I need to produce a signal x=-2*cos(100*pi*n)+2*cos(140*pi*n)+cos(200*pi*n)
So I put it like this :
N=1024;
for n=1:N
x=-2*cos(100*pi*n)+2*cos(140*pi*n)+cos(200*pi*n);
end
But What I get is that the result keeps giving out 1
I tried to test each values according to each n, and I get the same results for any n
For example -2*cos(100*pi*n) with n=1 has to be -1.393310473. Instead of that, Matlab gave the result -2 for it and it always gave -2 for any n
I don't know how to fix it, so I hope someone could help me out! Thank you!
Not sure where you get the idea that -2*cos(100*pi) should be anything other than -2. Maybe you are not aware that Matlab works in radians?
Look at your expression. Each term can be factored to contain 2*pi*(an integer). And you should know that cos(2*pi*(an integer)) = 1.
So the results are exactly as expected.
What you are seeing is basically what happens when you under-sample a waveform. You may know that the Nyquist criterion says that you need to have a sampling rate that is at least two times greater than the highest frequency component present; but in your case, you are sampling one point every 50, 70, 100 complete cycles. So you are "far beyond Nyquist". And that can only be solved by sampling more closely.
For example, you could do:
t = linspace(0, 1, 1024); % sample the waveform 1024 times between 0 and 1
f1 = 50;
f2 = 70;
f3 = 100;
signal = -2*cos(2*pi*f1*t) + 2*cos(2*pi*f2*t) + cos(2*pi*f3*t);
figure; plot(t, signal)
I think you are using degrees when you are doing your calculations, so do this:
n = 1:1024
x=-2*cosd(100*pi*n)+2*cosd(140*pi*n)+cosd(200*pi*n);
cosd uses degrees instead of radians. Radians is the default for cos so matlab has a separate function when degree input is used. For me this gave:
-2*cosd(100*pi*1) = -1.3933
The first term that I got using:
x=-2*cosd(100*pi*1)+2*cosd(140*pi*1)+cosd(200*pi*1)
x = -1.0693
Also notice that I defined n as n = 1:1024; this will give all integers from 1,2,...,1024,
there is no need to use a for loop since many of Matlab's built in functions are vectorized. Meaning you can just input a vector and it will calculate the function for every element in the vector.

A moving average with different functions and varying time-frames

I have a matrix time-series data for 8 variables with about 2500 points (~10 years of mon-fri) and would like to calculate the mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis on a 'moving average' basis.
Lets say frames = [100 252 504 756] - I would like calculate the four functions above on over each of the (time-)frames, on a daily basis - so the return for day 300 in the case with 100 day-frame, would be [mean variance skewness kurtosis] from the period day201-day300 (100 days in total)... and so on.
I know this means I would get an array output, and the the first frame number of days would be NaNs, but I can't figure out the required indexing to get this done...
This is an interesting question because I think the optimal solution is different for the mean than it is for the other sample statistics.
I've provided a simulation example below that you can work through.
First, choose some arbitrary parameters and simulate some data:
%#Set some arbitrary parameters
T = 100; N = 5;
WindowLength = 10;
%#Simulate some data
X = randn(T, N);
For the mean, use filter to obtain a moving average:
MeanMA = filter(ones(1, WindowLength) / WindowLength, 1, X);
MeanMA(1:WindowLength-1, :) = nan;
I had originally thought to solve this problem using conv as follows:
MeanMA = nan(T, N);
for n = 1:N
MeanMA(WindowLength:T, n) = conv(X(:, n), ones(WindowLength, 1), 'valid');
end
MeanMA = (1/WindowLength) * MeanMA;
But as #PhilGoddard pointed out in the comments, the filter approach avoids the need for the loop.
Also note that I've chosen to make the dates in the output matrix correspond to the dates in X so in later work you can use the same subscripts for both. Thus, the first WindowLength-1 observations in MeanMA will be nan.
For the variance, I can't see how to use either filter or conv or even a running sum to make things more efficient, so instead I perform the calculation manually at each iteration:
VarianceMA = nan(T, N);
for t = WindowLength:T
VarianceMA(t, :) = var(X(t-WindowLength+1:t, :));
end
We could speed things up slightly by exploiting the fact that we have already calculated the mean moving average. Simply replace the within loop line in the above with:
VarianceMA(t, :) = (1/(WindowLength-1)) * sum((bsxfun(#minus, X(t-WindowLength+1:t, :), MeanMA(t, :))).^2);
However, I doubt this will make much difference.
If anyone else can see a clever way to use filter or conv to get the moving window variance I'd be very interested to see it.
I leave the case of skewness and kurtosis to the OP, since they are essentially just the same as the variance example, but with the appropriate function.
A final point: if you were converting the above into a general function, you could pass in an anonymous function as one of the arguments, then you would have a moving average routine that works for arbitrary choice of transformations.
Final, final point: For a sequence of window lengths, simply loop over the entire code block for each window length.
I have managed to produce a solution, which only uses basic functions within MATLAB and can also be expanded to include other functions, (for finance: e.g. a moving Sharpe Ratio, or a moving Sortino Ratio). The code below shows this and contains hopefully sufficient commentary.
I am using a time series of Hedge Fund data, with ca. 10 years worth of daily returns (which were checked to be stationary - not shown in the code). Unfortunately I haven't got the corresponding dates in the example so the x-axis in the plots would be 'no. of days'.
% start by importing the data you need - here it is a selection out of an
% excel spreadsheet
returnsHF = xlsread('HFRXIndices_Final.xlsx','EquityHedgeMarketNeutral','D1:D2742');
% two years to be used for the moving average. (250 business days in one year)
window = 500;
% create zero-matrices to fill with the MA values at each point in time.
mean_avg = zeros(length(returnsHF)-window,1);
st_dev = zeros(length(returnsHF)-window,1);
skew = zeros(length(returnsHF)-window,1);
kurt = zeros(length(returnsHF)-window,1);
% Now work through the time-series with each of the functions (one can add
% any other functions required), assinging the values to the zero-matrices
for count = window:length(returnsHF)
% This is the most tricky part of the script, the indexing in this section
% The TwoYearReturn is what is shifted along one period at a time with the
% for-loop.
TwoYearReturn = returnsHF(count-window+1:count);
mean_avg(count-window+1) = mean(TwoYearReturn);
st_dev(count-window+1) = std(TwoYearReturn);
skew(count-window+1) = skewness(TwoYearReturn);
kurt(count-window +1) = kurtosis(TwoYearReturn);
end
% Plot the MAs
subplot(4,1,1), plot(mean_avg)
title('2yr mean')
subplot(4,1,2), plot(st_dev)
title('2yr stdv')
subplot(4,1,3), plot(skew)
title('2yr skewness')
subplot(4,1,4), plot(kurt)
title('2yr kurtosis')

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.