Extremely large weighted average - matlab

Question

I am using 64 bit matlab with 32g of RAM (just so you know).
I have a file (vector) of 1.3 million numbers (integers). I want to make another vector of the same length, where each point is a weighted average of the entire first vector, weighted by the inverse distance from that position (actually it's position ^-0.1, not ^-1, but for example purposes). I can't use matlab's 'filter' function, because it can only average things before the current point, right? To explain more clearly, here's an example of 3 elements
data = [ 2 6 9 ]
weights = [ 1 1/2 1/3; 1/2 1 1/2; 1/3 1/2 1 ]
results=data*weights= [ 8 11.5 12.666 ]
i.e.
8 = 2*1 + 6*1/2 + 9*1/3
11.5 = 2*1/2 + 6*1 + 9*1/2
12.666 = 2*1/3 + 6*1/2 + 9*1
So each point in the new vector is the weighted average of the entire first vector, weighting by 1/(distance from that position+1).
I could just remake the weight vector for each point, then calculate the results vector element by element, but this requires 1.3 million iterations of a for loop, each of which contains 1.3million multiplications. I would rather use straight matrix multiplication, multiplying a 1x1.3mil by a 1.3milx1.3mil, which works in theory, but I can't load a matrix that large.
I am then trying to make the matrix using a shell script and index it in matlab so only the relevant column of the matrix is called at a time, but that is also taking a very long time.
I don't have to do this in matlab, so any advice people have about utilizing such large numbers and getting averages would be appreciated. Since I am using a weight of ^-0.1, and not ^-1, it does not drop off that fast - the millionth point is still weighted at 0.25 compared to the original points weighting of 1, so I can't just cut it off as it gets big either.
Hope this was clear enough?
Here is the code for the answer below (so it can be formatted?):
data = load('/Users/mmanary/Documents/test/insertion.txt');
data=data.';
total=length(data);
x=1:total;
datapad=[zeros(1,total) data];
weights = ([(total+1):-1:2 1:total]).^(-.4);
weights = weights/sum(weights);
Fdata = fft(datapad);
Fweights = fft(weights);
Fresults = Fdata .* Fweights;
results = ifft(Fresults);
results = results(1:total);
plot(x,results)

Answer 1

The only sensible way to do this is with FFT convolution, as underpins the filter function and similar. It is very easy to do manually:
% Simulate some data
n = 10^6;
x = randi(10,1,n);
xpad = [zeros(1,n) x];
% Setup smoothing kernel
k = 1 ./ [(n+1):-1:2 1:n];
% FFT convolution
Fx = fft(xpad);
Fk = fft(k);
Fxk = Fx .* Fk;
xk = ifft(Fxk);
xk = xk(1:n);
Takes less than half a second for n=10^6!

Answer 2

This is probably not the best way to do it, but with lots of memory you could definitely parallelize the process.
You can construct sparse matrices consisting of entries of your original matrix which have value i^(-1) (where i = 1 .. 1.3 million), multiply them with your original vector, and sum all the results together.
So for your example the product would be essentially:
a = rand(3,1);
b1 = [1 0 0;
0 1 0;
0 0 1];
b2 = [0 1 0;
1 0 1;
0 1 0] / 2;
b3 = [0 0 1;
0 0 0;
1 0 0] / 3;
c = sparse(b1) * a + sparse(b2) * a + sparse(b3) * a;
Of course, you wouldn't construct the sparse matrices this way. If you wanted to have less iterations of the inside loop, you could have more than one of the i's in each matrix.
Look into the parfor loop in MATLAB: http://www.mathworks.com/help/toolbox/distcomp/parfor.html

Answer 3

I can't use matlab's 'filter' function, because it can only average
things before the current point, right?
That is not correct. You can always add samples (i.e, adding or removing zeros) from your data or from the filtered data. Since filtering with filter (you can also use conv by the way) is a linear action, it won't change the result (it's like adding and removing zeros, which does nothing, and then filtering. Then linearity allows you to swap the order to add samples -> filter -> remove sample).
Anyway, in your example, you can take the averaging kernel to be:
weights = 1 ./ [3 2 1 2 3]; % this kernel introduces a delay of 2 samples
and then simply:
result = filter(w,1,[data, zeros(1,3)]); % or conv (data, w)
% removing the delay introduced by the kernel
result = result (3:end-1);

Answer 4

You considered only 2 options:
Multiplying 1.3M*1.3M matrix with a vector once or multiplying 2 1.3M vectors 1.3M times.
But you can divide your weight matrix to as many sub-matrices as you wish and do a multiplication of n*1.3M matrix with the vector 1.3M/n times.
I assume that the fastest will be when there will be the smallest number of iterations and n is such that creates the largest sub-matrix that fits in your memory, without making your computer start swapping pages to your hard drive.
with your memory size you should start with n=5000.
you can also make it faster by using parfor (with n divided by the number of processors).

Answer 5

The brute force way will probably work for you, with one minor optimisation in the mix.
The ^-0.1 operations to create the weights will take a lot longer than the + and * operations to compute the weighted-means, but you re-use the weights across all the million weighted-mean operations. The algorithm becomes:
Create a weightings vector with all the weights any computation would need:
weights = (-n:n).^-0.1
For each element in the vector:
Index the relevent portion of the weights vector to consider the current element as the 'centre'.
Perform the weighted-mean with the weights portion and the entire vector. This can be done with a fast vector dot-multiply followed by a scalar division.
The main loop does n^2 additions and subractions. With n equal to 1.3 million that's 3.4 trillion operations. A single core of a modern 3GHz CPU can do say 6 billion additions/multiplications a second, so that comes out to around 10 minutes. Add time for indexing the weights vector and overheads, and I still estimate you could come in under half an hour.