Least squares optimal scaling - matlab

I have two waveforms which are linked by a numerical factor. I need to use optimal scaling (least squares) between the two waveforms to calculate this factor in Matlab. Unfortunately I have no idea how to do this. The two wave forms are seismic signals related by the velocity of the seismic waves, which I'm trying to calculate. Any ideas? need more info?

Call W1 and W2 the two vectors. For this to work, they must be column vectors. Transpose them if they are rows instead of columns. Then if we wish to find the value of k such that W1 = k*W2, just use backslash.
k = W2\W1;
Backslash here gives you a linear regression (least squares) estimator, as requested. This does not handle the unknown phase shift case of course.

one cheesy way to estimate the linear factor without having to deal with phase shift is to compute the ratio of the estimated scales of the waves. the cheesiest way is to use standard deviation:
k = std(W1) / std(W2);
if you care about robustness, I would substitute in the MAD or the IQR; the MAD is the median absolute deviation, which you can (somewhat inefficiently) 'inline' as so:
MAD = #(x)(median(abs(bsxfun(#minus,x,median(x)))));
k = MAD(W1) / MAD(W2);
the IQR is the interquartile range, which requires a proper quantile computation. you can implement this inefficiently using sort. I leave this as an exercise to the reader.

Related

Transforming draws in Matlab from Gaussian mixture to uniform

Consider the following draws for a 2x1 vector in Matlab with a probability distribution that is a mixture of two Gaussian components.
P=10^3; %number draws
v=1;
%First component
mu_a = [0,0.5];
sigma_a = [v,0;0,v];
%Second component
mu_b = [0,8.2];
sigma_b = [v,0;0,v];
%Combine
MU = [mu_a;mu_b];
SIGMA = cat(3,sigma_a,sigma_b);
w = ones(1,2)/2; %equal weight 0.5
obj = gmdistribution(MU,SIGMA,w);
%Draws
RV_temp = random(obj,P);%Px2
% Transform each component of RV_temp into a uniform in [0,1] by estimating the cdf.
RV1=ksdensity(RV_temp(:,1), RV_temp(:,1),'function', 'cdf');
RV2=ksdensity(RV_temp(:,2), RV_temp(:,2),'function', 'cdf');
Now, if we check whether RV1 and RV2 are uniformly distributed on [0,1] by doing
ecdf(RV1)
ecdf(RV2)
we can see that RV1 is uniformly distributed on [0,1] (the empirical cdf is close to the 45 degree line) while RV2 is not.
I don't understand why. It seems that the more distant are mu_a(2)and mu_b(2), the worse the job done by ksdensity with a reasonable number of draws. Why?
When you have a mixture of N(0.5,v) and N(8.2,v) then the range of the generated data is larger than if you had expectation which were closer, like N(0,v) and N(0,v), as you have in the other dimension. Then you ask ksdensity to approximate a function using P points inside this range.
Like in standard linear interpolation, the denser the points the better approximation of the function (inside the range), this is the same case here. Thus in the N(0.5,v) and N(8.2,v) where the points are "sparse" (or sparser, is that a word?) the approximation is worse than in the N(0,v) and N(0,v) where the points are denser.
As a small side note, are there any reason that you do not apply ksdensity directly on the bivariate data? Also I cannot reproduce your comment where you say that 5e2points are also good. Final comment, 1e3 is typically prefered over 10^3.
I think this is simply about the number of samples you're using. For the first example, the means of the two Gaussians are relatively close, hence a thousand samples are enough to obtain a cdf really close the the U[0,1] cdf. On the second vector though, you have a higher difference, and need more samples. With 100000 samples, I obtained the following result:
With 1000 I obtained this:
Which is clearly farther from the Uniform cdf function. Try to increase the number of samples to a million and check if the result is again getting closer.

Should I perform data centering before apply SVD?

I have to use SVD in Matlab to obtain a reduced version of my data.
I've read that the function svds(X,k) performs the SVD and returns the first k eigenvalues and eigenvectors. There is not mention in the documentation if the data have to be normalized.
With normalization I mean both substraction of the mean value and division by the standard deviation.
When I implemented PCA, I used to normalize in such way. But I know that it is not needed when using the matlab function pca() because it computes the covariance matrix by using cov() which implicitly performs the normalization.
So, the question is. I need the projection matrix useful to reduce my n-dim data to k-dim ones by SVD. Should I perform data normalization of the train data (and therefore, the same normalization to further projected new data) or not?
Thanks
Essentially, the answer is yes, you should typically perform normalization. The reason is that features can have very different scalings, and we typically do not want to take scaling into account when considering the uniqueness of features.
Suppose we have two features x and y, both with variance 1, but where x has a mean of 1 and y has a mean of 1000. Then the matrix of samples will look like
n = 500; % samples
x = 1 + randn(n,1);
y = 1000 + randn(n,1);
svd([x,y])
But the problem with this is that the scale of y (without normalizing) essentially washes out the small variations in x. Specifically, if we just examine the singular values of [x,y], we might be inclined to say that x is a linear factor of y (since one of the singular values is much smaller than the other). But actually, we know that that is not the case since x was generated independently.
In fact, you will often find that you only see the "real" data in a signal once we remove the mean. At the extremely end, you could image that we have some feature
z = 1e6 + sin(t)
Now if somebody just gave you those numbers, you might look at the sequence
z = 1000001.54, 1000001.2, 1000001.4,...
and just think, "that signal is boring, it basically is just 1e6 plus some round off terms...". But once we remove the mean, we see the signal for what it actually is... a very interesting and specific one indeed. So long story short, you should always remove the means and scale.
It really depends on what you want to do with your data. Centering and scaling can be helpful to obtain principial components that are representative of the shape of the variations in the data, irrespective of the scaling. I would say it is mostly needed if you want to further use the principal components itself, particularly, if you want to visualize them. It can also help during classification since your scores will then be normalized which may help your classifier. However, it depends on the application since in some applications the energy also carries useful information that one should not discard - there is no general answer!
Now you write that all you need is "the projection matrix useful to reduce my n-dim data to k-dim ones by SVD". In this case, no need to center or scale anything:
[U,~] = svd(TrainingData);
RecudedData = U(:,k)'*TestData;
will do the job. The svds may be worth considering when your TrainingData is huge (in both dimensions) so that svd is too slow (if it is huge in one dimension, just apply svd to the gram matrix).
It depends!!!
A common use in signal processing where it makes no sense to normalize is noise reduction via dimensionality reduction in correlated signals where all the fearures are contiminated with a random gaussian noise with the same variance. In that case if the magnitude of a certain feature is twice as large it's snr is also approximately twice as large so normalizing the features makes no sense since it would just make the parts with the worse snr larger and the parts with the good snr smaller. You also don't need to subtract the mean in that case (like in PCA), the mean (or dc) isn't different then any other frequency.

Mixture of 1D Gaussians fit to data in Matlab / Python

I have a discrete curve y=f(x). I know the locations and amplitudes of peaks. I want to approximate the curve by fitting a gaussian at each peak. How should I go about finding the optimized gaussian parameters ? I would like to know if there is any inbuilt function which will make my task simpler.
Edit
I have fixed mean of gaussians and tried to optimize on sigma using
lsqcurvefit() in matlab. MSE is less. However, I have an additional hard constraint that the value of approximate curve should be equal to the original function at the peaks. This constraint is not satisfied by my model. I am pasting current working code here. I would like to have a solution which obeys the hard constraint at peaks and approximately fits the curve at other points. The basic idea is that the approximate curve has fewer parameters but still closely resembles the original curve.
fun = #(x,xdata)myFun(x,xdata,pks,locs); %pks,locs are the peak locations and amplitudes already available
x0=w(1:6)*0.25; % my initial guess based on domain knowledge
[sigma resnorm] = lsqcurvefit(fun,x0,xdata,ydata); %xdata and ydata are the original curve data points
recons = myFun(sigma,xdata,pks,locs);
figure;plot(ydata,'r');hold on;plot(recons);
function f=myFun(sigma,xdata,a,c)
% a is constant , c is mean of individual gaussians
f=zeros(size(xdata));
for i = 1:6 %use 6 gaussians to approximate function
f = f + a(i) * exp(-(xdata-c(i)).^2 ./ (2*sigma(i)^2));
end
end
If you know your peak locations and amplitudes, then all you have left to do is find the width of each Gaussian. You can think of this as an optimization problem.
Say you have x and y, which are samples from the curve you want to approximate.
First, define a function g() that will construct the approximation for given values of the widths. g() takes a parameter vector sigma containing the width of each Gaussian. The locations and amplitudes of the Gaussians will be constrained to the values you already know. g() outputs the value of the sum-of-gaussians approximation at each point in x.
Now, define a loss function L(), which takes sigma as input. L(sigma) returns a scalar that measures the error--how badly the given approximation (using sigma) differs from the curve you're trying to approximate. The squared error is a common loss function for curve fitting:
L(sigma) = sum((y - g(sigma)) .^ 2)
The task now is to search over possible values of sigma, and find the choice that minimizes the error. This can be done using a variety of optimization routines.
If you have the Mathworks optimization toolbox, you can use the function lsqnonlin() (in this case you won't have to define L() yourself). The curve fitting toolbox is probably an alternative. Otherwise, you can use an open source optimization routine (check out cvxopt).
A couple things to note. You need to impose the constraint that all values in sigma are greater than zero. You can tell the optimization algorithm about this constraint. Also, you'll need to specify an initial guess for the parameters (i.e. sigma). In this case, you could probably choose something reasonable by looking at the curve in the vicinity of each peak. It may be the case (when the loss function is nonconvex) that the final solution is different, depending on the initial guess (i.e. you converge to a local minimum). There are many fancy techniques for dealing with this kind of situation, but a simple thing to do is to just try with multiple different initial guesses, and pick the best result.
Edited to add:
In python, you can use optimization routines in the scipy.optimize module, e.g. curve_fit().
Edit 2 (response to edited question):
If your Gaussians have much overlap with each other, then taking their sum may cause the height of the peaks to differ from your known values. In this case, you could take a weighted sum, and treat the weights as another parameter to optimize.
If you want the peak heights to be exactly equal to some specified values, you can enforce this constraint in the optimization problem. lsqcurvefit() won't be able to do it because it only handles bound constraints on the parameters. Take a look at fmincon().
you can use Expectation–Maximization algorithm for fitting Mixture of Gaussians on your data. it don't care about data dimension.
in documentation of MATLAB you can lookup gmdistribution.fit or fitgmdist.

Normalize in Adaboost without numerical error - Matlab

I'm implementing AdaBoost on Matlab. This algorithm requires that in every iteration the weights of each data point in the training set sum up to one.
If I simply use the following normalization v = v / sum(v) I get a vector whose 1-norm is 1 except some numerical error which later leads to the failure of the algorithm.
Is there a matlab function for normalizing a vector so that it's 1-norm is EXACTLY 1?
Assuming you want identical values to be normalised with the same factor, this is not possible. Simple counter example:
v=ones(21,1);
v = v / sum(v);
sum(v)-1
One common way to deal with it, is enforce values sum(v)>=1 or sum(v)<=1 if your algorithm can deal with a derivation to one side:
if sum(v)>1
v=v-eps(v)
end
Alternatively you can try using vpa, but this will drastically increase your computation time.

Creating a 1D Second derivative of gaussian Window

In MATLAB I need to generate a second derivative of a gaussian window to apply to a vector representing the height of a curve. I need the second derivative in order to determine the locations of the inflection points and maxima along the curve. The vector representing the curve may be quite noise hence the use of the gaussian window.
What is the best way to generate this window?
Is it best to use the gausswin function to generate the gaussian window then take the second derivative of that?
Or to generate the window manually using the equation for the second derivative of the gaussian?
Or even is it best to apply the gaussian window to the data, then take the second derivative of it all? (I know these last two are mathematically the same, however with the discrete data points I do not know which will be more accurate)
The maximum length of the height vector is going to be around 100-200 elements.
Thanks
Chris
I would create a linear filter composed of the weights generated by the second derivative of a Gaussian function and convolve this with your vector.
The weights of a second derivative of a Gaussian are given by:
Where:
Tau is the time shift for the filter. If you are generating weights for a discrete filter of length T with an odd number of samples, set tau to zero and allow t to vary from [-T/2,T/2]
sigma - varies the scale of your operator. Set sigma to a value somewhere between T/6. If you are concerned about long filter length then this can be reduced to T/4
C is the normalising factor. This can be derived algebraically but in practice I always do this numerically after calculating the filter weights. For unity gain when smoothing periodic signals, I will set C = 1 / sum(G'').
In terms of your comment on the equivalence of smoothing first and taking a derivative later, I would say it is more involved than that. As which derivative operator would you use in the second step? A simple central difference would not yield the same results.
You can get an equivalent (but approximate) response to a second derivative of a Gaussian by filtering the data with two Gaussians of different scales and then taking the point-wise differences between the two resulting vectors. See Difference of Gaussians for that approach.