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Weird results obtained while solving a set of coupled differential equations (using a sparse array) in python

I have tried to no avail for a week while trying to solve a system of coupled differential equations and reproduce the results shown in the attached image. I seem to be getting weird results as shown also. I don't seem to know what I might be doing wrong.The set of coupled differential equations were solved using Newman's BAND. Here's a link to the python implementation: python solution using BAND . And another link to the original image of the problem in case the attached is not clear enough: here you find a clearer image of the problem. Now what I am trying to do is to solve the same problem by creating a sparse array directly from the discretized equations using a combination of sympy and numpy and then solving using scipy's spsolve. Here is my code below. I need some help to figure out what I am doing wrong.
I have represented the variables as c1 = cA, c2 = cB, c3 = cC, c4 = cD in my code. Equation 2 has been linearized and phi10 and phi20 are the trial values of the variables cC and cD.
# import modules
import numpy as np
import sympy
from sympy.core.function import _mexpand
import scipy as sp
import scipy.sparse as ss
import scipy.sparse.linalg as ssl
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# define functions
def flatten(t):
"""
function to flatten lists
"""
return [item for sublist in t for item in sublist]
def get_coeffs(coeff_dict, func_vars):
"""
function to extract coefficients from variables
and form the sparse symbolic array
"""
c = coeff_dict
for i in list(c.keys()):
b, _ = i.as_base_exp()
if b == i:
continue
if b in c:
c[i] = 0
if any(k.has(b) for k in c):
c[i] = 0
return [coeff_dict[val] for val in func_vars]
# Constants for the problem
I = 0.1 # A/cm2
L = 1.0 # distance (x) in cm
m = 100 # grid spacing
h = L / (m-1)
a = 23300 # 1/cm
io = 2e-7 # A/cm2
n = 1
F = 96500 # C/mol
R = 8.314 # J/mol-K
T = 298 # K
sigma = 20 # S/cm
kappa = 0.06 # S/cm
alpha = 0.5
beta = -(1-alpha)*n*F/R/T
phi10 , phi20 = 5, 0.5 # these are just guesses
P = a*io*np.exp(beta*(phi10-phi20))
j = sympy.symbols('j',integer = True)
cA = sympy.IndexedBase('cA')
cB = sympy.IndexedBase('cB')
cC = sympy.IndexedBase('cC')
cD = sympy.IndexedBase('cD')
# write the boundary conditions at x = 0
bc=[cA[1], cB[1],
(4/3) * cC[2] - (1/3)*cC[3], # use a three point approximation for cC_prime
cD[1]
]
# form a list of expressions from the boundary conditions and equations
expr=flatten([bc,flatten([[
-cA[j-1] - cB[j-1] + cA[j+1] + cB[j+1],
cB[j-1] - 2*h*P*beta*cC[j] + 2*h*P*beta*cD[j] - cB[j+1],
-sigma*cC[j-1] + 2*h*cA[j] + sigma * cC[j+1],
-kappa * cD[j-1] + 2*h * cB[j] + kappa * cD[j+1]] for j in range(2, m)])])
vars = [cA[j], cB[j], cC[j], cD[j]]
# flatten the list of variables
unknowns = flatten([[cA[j], cB[j], cC[j], cD[j]] for j in range(1,m)])
var_len = len(unknowns)
# # # substitute in the boundary conditions at x = L while getting the coefficients
A = sympy.SparseMatrix([get_coeffs(_mexpand(i.subs({cA[m]:I}))\
.as_coefficients_dict(), unknowns) for i in expr])
# convert to a numpy array
mat_temp = np.array(A).astype(np.float64)
# you can view the sparse array with this
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(6,6))
ax = fig.add_axes([0,0, 1,1])
cmap = plt.cm.binary
plt.spy(mat_temp, cmap = cmap, alpha = 0.8)
def solve_sparse(b0, error):
# create the b column vector
b = np.copy(b0)
b[0:4] = np.array([0.0, I, 0.0, 0.0])
b[var_len-4] = I
b[var_len-3] = 0
b[var_len-2] = 0
b[var_len-1] = 0
print(b.shape)
old = np.copy(b0)
mat = np.copy(mat_temp)
b_2 = np.copy(b)
resid = 10
lss = 0
while lss < 100:
mat_2 = np.copy(mat)
for j in range(3, var_len - 3, 4):
# update the forcing term of equation 2
b_2[j+2] = 2*h*(1-beta*old[j+3]+beta*old[j+4])*a*io*np.exp(beta*(old[j+3]-old[j+4]))
# update the sparse array at every iteration for variables cC and cD in equation2
mat_2[j+2, j+3] += 2*h*beta*a*io*np.exp(beta*(old[j+3]-old[j+4]))
mat_2[j+2, j+4] += 2*h*beta*a*io*np.exp(beta*(old[j+3]-old[j+4]))
# form the column sparse matrix
A_s = ss.csc_matrix(mat_2)
new = ssl.spsolve(A_s, b_2).flatten()
resid = np.sum((new - old)**2)/var_len
lss += 1
old = np.copy(new)
return new
val0 = np.array([[0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0] for _ in range(m-1)]).flatten() # form an array of initial values
error = 1e-7
## Run the code
conc = solve_sparse(val0, error).reshape(m-1, len(vars))
conc.shape # gives (99, 4)
# Plot result for cA:
plt.plot(conc[:,0], marker = 'o', linestyle = '')

What happens seems pretty clear now, after having seen that the plotted solution indeed oscillates between the upper and lower values. You are using the central Euler method as discretization, for u'=F(u) this reads as
u[j+1]-u[j-1] = 2*h*F(u[j])
This method is only weakly stable and allows the sub-sequences of odd and even indices to evolve rather independently. As equation this would mean that the solution might approximate the system ue'=F(uo), uo'=F(ue) with independent functions ue, uo that follow the path of the even or odd sub-sequence.
These even and odd parts are only tied together by the treatment of the boundary points, two or three points deep. So to avoid or reduce the oscillation requires a very careful handling of boundary conditions and also the differential equations for the boundary points.
But one can avoid all this unpleasantness by using the trapezoidal method
u[j+1]-u[j] = 0.5*h*(F(u[j+1])+F(u[j]))
This also reduces the band-width of the system matrix.
To properly implement the implied Newton method correctly (linearizing via Taylor and solving the linearized equation is what the Newton-Kantorovich method does) you need to replace F(u[j]) with F(u_old[j])+F'(u_old[j])*(u[j]-u_old[j]). This then gives a linear system of equations in u for the iteration step.
For the trapezoidal method this gives
(I-0.5*h*F'(u_old[j+1]))*u[j+1] - (I+0.5*h*F'(u_old[j]))*u[j]
= 0.5*h*(F(u_old[j+1])-F'(u_old[j+1])*u_old[j+1] + F(u_old[j])-F'(u_old[j])*u_old[j])
In general, the derivatives values and thus the system matrix need not be updated every step, only the function value (else the iteration does not move forward).

Progressively filter/smooth a signal in python (to straight line on the left to no filtering on the right)

A picture is worth a thousand words (sorry for the shoddy work):
If the solution is preserving the value and the slope at both ends it is better.
If, in addition, the position and sharpness of the transition can be adjusted it is perfect.
But I have not found any solution yet...
Thank you very much for your help
Here is a piece of code to get started:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from scipy.signal import savgol_filter
import numpy as np
def round_up_to_odd(f):
return np.int(np.ceil(f / 2.) * 2 + 1)
def generateRandomSignal(n=1000, seed=None):
"""
Parameters
----------
n : integer, optional
Number of points in the signal. The default is 1000.
Returns
-------
sig : numpy array
"""
np.random.seed(seed)
print("Seed was:", seed)
steps = np.random.choice(a=[-1, 0, 1], size=(n-1))
roughSig = np.concatenate([np.array([0]), steps]).cumsum(0)
sig = savgol_filter(roughSig, round_up_to_odd(n/20), 6)
return sig
n = 1000
t = np.linspace(0,10,n)
seed = np.random.randint(0,high=100000)
#seed = 45136
sig = generateRandomSignal(seed=seed)
###############################
# ????
# sigFilt = adaptiveFilter(sig)
###############################
# Plot
plt.figure()
plt.plot(t, sig, label="Signal")
# plt.plot(t, sigFilt, label="Signal filtered")
plt.legend()

Simple convolution does smoothing. However, as mentioned below, here we need strong smoothing first and no smoothing towards the end. I used the moving average approach with the dynamic size of the window. In the example below, the window size changes linearly.
def dynamic_smoothing(x, start_window_length=(len(x)//2), end_window_length=1):
d_sum = np.cumsum(a, dtype=float)
smoothed = list()
for i in range(len(x)):
# compute window length
a = i / len(x)
w = int(np.round(a * start_window_length + (1.0-a) * end_window_length))
# get the window
w0 = max(0, i - w) # the window must stay inside the array
w1 = min(len(x), i + w)
smoothed.append(sum(x[w0:w1])/(w1+w0))
return np.array(smoothed)

Speeding up normal distribution probability mass allocation

We have N users with P avg. points per user, where each point is a single value between 0 and 1. We need to distribute the mass of each point using a normal distribution with a known density of 0.05 as the points have some uncertainty. Additionally, we need to wrap the mass around 0 and 1 such that e.g. a point at 0.95 will also allocate mass around 0. I've provided a working example below, which bins the normal distribution into D=50 bins. The example uses the Python typing module, but you can ignore that if you'd like.
from typing import List, Any
import numpy as np
import scipy.stats
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
D = 50
BINS: List[float] = np.linspace(0, 1, D + 1).tolist()
def probability_mass(distribution: Any, x0: float, x1: float) -> float:
"""
Computes the area under the distribution, wrapping at 1.
The wrapping is done by adding the PDF at +- 1.
"""
assert x1 > x0
return (
(distribution.cdf(x1) - distribution.cdf(x0))
+ (distribution.cdf(x1 + 1) - distribution.cdf(x0 + 1))
+ (distribution.cdf(x1 - 1) - distribution.cdf(x0 - 1))
)
def point_density(x: float) -> List[float]:
distribution: Any = scipy.stats.norm(loc=x, scale=0.05)
density: List[float] = []
for i in range(D):
density.append(probability_mass(distribution, BINS[i], BINS[i + 1]))
return density
def user_density(points: List[float]) -> Any:
# Find the density of each point
density: Any = np.array([point_density(p) for p in points])
# Combine points and normalize
combined = density.sum(axis=0)
return combined / combined.sum()
if __name__ == "__main__":
# Example for one user
data: List[float] = [.05, .3, .5, .5]
density = user_density(data)
# Example for multiple users (N = 2)
print([user_density(x) for x in [[.3, .5], [.7, .7, .7, .9]]])
### NB: THE REMAINING CODE IS FOR ILLUSTRATION ONLY!
### NB: THE IMPORTANT THING IS TO COMPUTE THE DENSITY FAST!
middle: List[float] = []
for i in range(D):
middle.append((BINS[i] + BINS[i + 1]) / 2)
plt.bar(x=middle, height=density, width=1.0 / D + 0.001)
plt.xlim(0, 1)
plt.xlabel("x")
plt.ylabel("Density")
plt.show()
In this example N=1, D=50, P=4. However, we want to scale this approach to N=10000 and P=100 while being as fast as possible. It's unclear to me how we'd vectorize this approach. How do we best speed up this?
EDIT
The faster solution can have slightly different results. For instance, it could approximate the normal distribution instead of using the precise normal distribution.
EDIT2
We only care about computing density using the user_density() function. The plot is only to help explain the approach. We do not care about the plot itself :)
EDIT3
Note that P is the avg. points per user. Some users may have more and some may have less. If it helps, you can assume that we can throw away points such that all users have a max of 2 * P points. It's fine to ignore this part while benchmarking as long as the solution can handle a flexible # of points per user.

You could get below 50ms for largest case (N=10000, AVG[P]=100, D=50) by using using FFT and creating data in numpy friendly format. Otherwise it will be closer to 300 msec.
The idea is to convolve a single normal distribution centered at 0 with a series Dirac deltas.
See image below:
Using circular convolution solves two issues.
naturally deals with wrapping at the edges
can be efficiently computed with FFT and Convolution Theorem
First one must create a distribution to be copied. Function mk_bell() created a histogram of a normal distribution of stddev 0.05 centered at 0.
The distribution wraps around 1. One could use arbitrary distribution here. The spectrum of the distribution is computed are used for fast convolution.
Next a comb-like function is created. The peaks are placed at indices corresponding to peaks in user density. E.g.
peaks_location = [0.1, 0.3, 0.7]
D = 10
maps to
peak_index = (D * peak_location).astype(int) = [1, 3, 7]
dist = [0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0] # ones at [1, 3, 7]
You can quickly create a composition of Diract Deltas by computing indices of the bins for each peak location with help of np.bincount() function.
In order to speed things even more one can compute comb-functions for user-peaks in parallel.
Array dist is 2D-array of shape NxD. It can be linearized to 1D array of shape (N*D). After this change element on position [user_id, peak_index] will be accessible from index user_id*D + peak_index.
With numpy-friendly input format (described below) this operation is easily vectorized.
The convolution theorem says that spectrum of convolution of two signals is equal to product of spectrums of each signal.
The spectrum is compute with numpy.fft.rfft which is a variant of Fast Fourier Transfrom dedicated to real-only signals (no imaginary part).
Numpy allows to compute FFT of each row of the larger matrix with one command.
Next, the spectrum of convolution is computed by simple multiplication and use of broadcasting.
Next, the spectrum is computed back to "time" domain by Inverse Fourier Transform implemented in numpy.fft.irfft.
To use the full speed of numpy one should avoid variable size data structure and keep to fixed size arrays. I propose to represent input data as three arrays.
uids the identifier for user, integer 0..N-1
peaks, the location of the peak
mass, the mass of the peek, currently it is 1/numer-of-peaks-for-user
This representation of data allows quick vectorized processing.
Eg:
user_data = [[0.1, 0.3], [0.5]]
maps to:
uids = [0, 0, 1] # 2 points for user_data[0], one from user_data[1]
peaks = [0.1, 0.3, 0.5] # serialized user_data
mass = [0.5, 0.5, 1] # scaling factors for each peak, 0.5 means 2 peaks for user 0
The code:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import time
def mk_bell(D, SIGMA):
# computes normal distribution wrapped and centered at zero
x = np.linspace(0, 1, D, endpoint=False);
x = (x + 0.5) % 1 - 0.5
bell = np.exp(-0.5*np.square(x / SIGMA))
return bell / bell.sum()
def user_densities_by_fft(uids, peaks, mass, D, N=None):
bell = mk_bell(D, 0.05).astype('f4')
sbell = np.fft.rfft(bell)
if N is None:
N = uids.max() + 1
# ensure that peaks are in [0..1) internal
peaks = peaks - np.floor(peaks)
# convert peak location from 0-1 to the indices
pidx = (D * (peaks + uids)).astype('i4')
dist = np.bincount(pidx, mass, N * D).reshape(N, D)
# process all users at once with Convolution Theorem
sdist = np.fft.rfft(dist)
sdist *= sbell
res = np.fft.irfft(sdist)
return res
def generate_data(N, Pmean):
# generateor for large data
data = []
for n in range(N):
# select P uniformly from 1..2*Pmean
P = np.random.randint(2 * Pmean) + 1
# select peak locations
chunk = np.random.uniform(size=P)
data.append(chunk.tolist())
return data
def make_data_numpy_friendly(data):
uids = []
chunks = []
mass = []
for uid, peaks in enumerate(data):
uids.append(np.full(len(peaks), uid))
mass.append(np.full(len(peaks), 1 / len(peaks)))
chunks.append(peaks)
return np.hstack(uids), np.hstack(chunks), np.hstack(mass)
D = 50
# demo for simple multi-distribution
data, N = [[0, .5], [.7, .7, .7, .9], [0.05, 0.3, 0.5, 0.5]], None
uids, peaks, mass = make_data_numpy_friendly(data)
dist = user_densities_by_fft(uids, peaks, mass, D, N)
plt.plot(dist.T)
plt.show()
# the actual measurement
N = 10000
P = 100
data = generate_data(N, P)
tic = time.time()
uids, peaks, mass = make_data_numpy_friendly(data)
toc = time.time()
print(f"make_data_numpy_friendly: {toc - tic}")
tic = time.time()
dist = user_densities_by_fft(uids, peaks, mass, D, N)
toc = time.time()
print(f"user_densities_by_fft: {toc - tic}")
The results on my 4-core Haswell machine are:
make_data_numpy_friendly: 0.2733159065246582
user_densities_by_fft: 0.04064297676086426
It took 40ms to process the data. Notice that processing data to numpy friendly format takes 6 times more time than the actual computation of distributions.
Python is really slow when it comes to looping.
Therefore I strongly recommend to generate input data directly in numpy-friendly way in the first place.
There are some issues to be fixed:
precision, can be improved by using larger D and downsampling
accuracy of peak location could be further improved by widening the spikes.
performance, scipy.fft offers move variants of FFT implementation that may be faster

This would be my vectorized approach:
data = np.array([0.05, 0.3, 0.5, 0.5])
np.random.seed(31415)
# random noise
randoms = np.random.normal(0,1,(len(data), int(1e5))) * 0.05
# samples with noise
samples = data[:,None] + randoms
# wrap [0,1]
samples = (samples % 1).ravel()
# histogram
hist, bins, patches = plt.hist(samples, bins=BINS, density=True)
Output:

I was able to reduce the time from about 4 seconds per sample of 100 datapoints to about 1 ms per sample.
It looks to me like you're spending quite a lot of time simulating a very large number of normal distributions. Since you're dealing with a very large sample size anyway, you may as well just use standard normal distribution values, because it'll all just average out anyway.
I recreated your approach (BaseMethod class), then created an optimized class (OptimizedMethod class), and evaluated them using a timeit decorator. The primary difference in my approach is the following line:
# Generate a standardized set of values to add to each sample to simulate normal distribution
self.norm_vals = np.array([norm.ppf(x / norm_val_n) * 0.05 for x in range(1, norm_val_n, 1)])
This creates a generic set of datapoints based on an inverse normal cumulative distribution function that we can add to each datapoint to simulate a normal distribution around that point. Then we just reshape the data into user samples and run np.histogram on the samples.
import numpy as np
import scipy.stats
from scipy.stats import norm
import time
# timeit decorator for evaluating performance
def timeit(method):
def timed(*args, **kw):
ts = time.time()
result = method(*args, **kw)
te = time.time()
print('%r %2.2f ms' % (method.__name__, (te - ts) * 1000 ))
return result
return timed
# Define Variables
N = 10000
D = 50
P = 100
# Generate sample data
np.random.seed(0)
data = np.random.rand(N, P)
# Run OP's method for comparison
class BaseMethod:
def __init__(self, d=50):
self.d = d
self.bins = np.linspace(0, 1, d + 1).tolist()
def probability_mass(self, distribution, x0, x1):
"""
Computes the area under the distribution, wrapping at 1.
The wrapping is done by adding the PDF at +- 1.
"""
assert x1 > x0
return (
(distribution.cdf(x1) - distribution.cdf(x0))
+ (distribution.cdf(x1 + 1) - distribution.cdf(x0 + 1))
+ (distribution.cdf(x1 - 1) - distribution.cdf(x0 - 1))
)
def point_density(self, x):
distribution = scipy.stats.norm(loc=x, scale=0.05)
density = []
for i in range(self.d):
density.append(self.probability_mass(distribution, self.bins[i], self.bins[i + 1]))
return density
#timeit
def base_user_density(self, data):
n = data.shape[0]
density = np.empty((n, self.d))
for i in range(data.shape[0]):
# Find the density of each point
row_density = np.array([self.point_density(p) for p in data[i]])
# Combine points and normalize
combined = row_density.sum(axis=0)
density[i, :] = combined / combined.sum()
return density
base = BaseMethod(d=D)
# Only running base method on first 2 rows of data because it's slow
density = base.base_user_density(data[:2])
print(density[:2, :5])
class OptimizedMethod:
def __init__(self, d=50, norm_val_n=50):
self.d = d
self.norm_val_n = norm_val_n
self.bins = np.linspace(0, 1, d + 1).tolist()
# Generate a standardized set of values to add to each sample to simulate normal distribution
self.norm_vals = np.array([norm.ppf(x / norm_val_n) * 0.05 for x in range(1, norm_val_n, 1)])
#timeit
def optimized_user_density(self, data):
samples = np.empty((data.shape[0], data.shape[1], self.norm_val_n - 1))
# transform datapoints to normal distributions around datapoint
for i in range(self.norm_vals.shape[0]):
samples[:, :, i] = data + self.norm_vals[i]
samples = samples.reshape(samples.shape[0], -1)
#wrap around [0, 1]
samples = samples % 1
#loop over samples for density
density = np.empty((data.shape[0], self.d))
for i in range(samples.shape[0]):
hist, bins = np.histogram(samples[i], bins=self.bins)
density[i, :] = hist / hist.sum()
return density
om = OptimizedMethod()
#Run optimized method on first 2 rows for apples to apples comparison
density = om.optimized_user_density(data[:2])
#Run optimized method on full data
density = om.optimized_user_density(data)
print(density[:2, :5])
Running on my system, the original method took about 8.4 seconds to run on 2 rows of data, while the optimized method took 1 millisecond to run on 2 rows of data and completed 10,000 rows in 4.7 seconds. I printed the first five values of the first 2 samples for each method.
'base_user_density' 8415.03 ms
[[0.02176227 0.02278653 0.02422535 0.02597123 0.02745976]
[0.0175103 0.01638513 0.01524853 0.01432158 0.01391156]]
'optimized_user_density' 1.09 ms
'optimized_user_density' 4755.49 ms
[[0.02142857 0.02244898 0.02530612 0.02612245 0.0277551 ]
[0.01673469 0.01653061 0.01510204 0.01428571 0.01326531]]

Why is minimize_scalar not minimizing correctly?

I am a new Python user, so bear with me if this question is obvious.
I am trying to find the value of lmbda that minimizes the following function, given a fixed vector Z and scalar sigma:
def sure_sft(z,lmbda, sigma):
indicator = np.abs(z) <= lmbda;
minimum = np.minimum(z**2,lmbda**2);
return -sigma**2*np.sum(indicator) + np.sum(minimum);
When I pass in values of lmbda manually, I find that the function produces the correct value of sure_stf. However, when I try to use the following code to find the value of lmbda that minimizes sure_stf:
minimize_scalar(lambda lmbda: sure_sft(Z, lmbda, sigma))
it gives me an incorrect value for sure_stf (-8.6731 for lmbda = 0.4916). If I pass in 0.4916 manually to sure_sft, I obtain -7.99809 instead. What am I doing incorrectly? I would appreciate any advice!
EDIT: I've pasted my code below. The data is from: https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/HallJones400.asc
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
from scipy.optimize import minimize_scalar
# FUNCTIONS
# Calculate orthogonal projection of g onto f
def proj(f, g):
return ( np.dot(f,g) / np.dot(f,f) ) * f
def gs(X):
# Copy of X -- will be used to store orthogonalization
F = np.copy(X)
# Orthogonalize design matrix
for i in range(1, X.shape[1]): # Iterate over columns of X
for j in range(i): # Iterate over columns less than current one
F[:,i] -= proj(F[:,j], X[:,i]) # Subtract projection of x_i onto f_j for all j<i from F_i
# normalize each column to have unit length
norm_F=( (F**2).mean(axis=0) ) ** 0.5 # Row vector with sqrt root of average of the squares of each column
W = F/norm_F # Normalize
return W
# SURE for soft-thresholding
def sure_sft(z,lmbda, sigma):
indicator = np.abs(z) <= lmbda
minimum = np.minimum(z**2,lmbda**2)
return -sigma**2*np.sum(indicator) + np.sum(minimum)
# Import data.
data_raw = pd.read_csv("hall_jones1999.csv")
# Drop missing observations.
data = data_raw.dropna(subset=['logYL', 'Latitude'])
Y = data['logYL']
Y = np.array(Y)
N = Y.size
# Create design matrix.
design = np.empty([data['Latitude'].size,15])
design[:,0] = 1
for j in range(1, 15):
design[:,j] = data['Latitude']**j
K = design.shape[1]
# Use Gramm-Schmidt on design matrix.
W = gs(design)
Z = np.dot(W.T, Y)/N
# MLE
mu_mle = np.dot(W, Z)
# Soft-thresholding
# Use MLE residuals to calculate sigma for SURE calculation
sigma = np.sqrt(np.sum((Y - mu_mle)**2)/(N-K))
# Write SURE as a function of lmbda
sure = lambda lmbda: sure_sft(Z, lmbda, sigma)
# Find SURE-minimizing lmbda
lmbda = minimize_scalar(sure).x
min_sure = minimize_scalar(sure).fun #-8.673172212265738
# Compare to manually inputting minimized lambda into sure_sft
# I'm s
act_sure1 = sure_sft(Z, 0.49167598, sigma) #-7.998060514873529
act_sure2 = sure_sft(Z, 0.491675989, sigma) #-8.673172212306728

You're actually not doing anything wrong. I just tested out the code and confirmed that lmbda has a value of 0.4916759890416824 at the end of the script. You can confirm this for yourself by adding the following lines to the bottom of your script:
print(lmbda)
print(sure_sft(Z, lmbda, sigma))
when you run your script you should then see:
0.4916759890416824
-8.673158394698172
The only thing I can figure is that somehow the routine you were using to print out lmbda was set up to only print a fixed number of digits of floating point numbers, or somehow the printout was otherwise truncated.

Pythonic way of detecting outliers in one dimensional observation data

For the given data, I want to set the outlier values (defined by 95% confidense level or 95% quantile function or anything that is required) as nan values. Following is the my data and code that I am using right now. I would be glad if someone could explain me further.
import numpy as np, matplotlib.pyplot as plt
data = np.random.rand(1000)+5.0
plt.plot(data)
plt.xlabel('observation number')
plt.ylabel('recorded value')
plt.show()

The problem with using percentile is that the points identified as outliers is a function of your sample size.
There are a huge number of ways to test for outliers, and you should give some thought to how you classify them. Ideally, you should use a-priori information (e.g. "anything above/below this value is unrealistic because...")
However, a common, not-too-unreasonable outlier test is to remove points based on their "median absolute deviation".
Here's an implementation for the N-dimensional case (from some code for a paper here: https://github.com/joferkington/oost_paper_code/blob/master/utilities.py):
def is_outlier(points, thresh=3.5):
"""
Returns a boolean array with True if points are outliers and False
otherwise.
Parameters:
-----------
points : An numobservations by numdimensions array of observations
thresh : The modified z-score to use as a threshold. Observations with
a modified z-score (based on the median absolute deviation) greater
than this value will be classified as outliers.
Returns:
--------
mask : A numobservations-length boolean array.
References:
----------
Boris Iglewicz and David Hoaglin (1993), "Volume 16: How to Detect and
Handle Outliers", The ASQC Basic References in Quality Control:
Statistical Techniques, Edward F. Mykytka, Ph.D., Editor.
"""
if len(points.shape) == 1:
points = points[:,None]
median = np.median(points, axis=0)
diff = np.sum((points - median)**2, axis=-1)
diff = np.sqrt(diff)
med_abs_deviation = np.median(diff)
modified_z_score = 0.6745 * diff / med_abs_deviation
return modified_z_score > thresh
This is very similar to one of my previous answers, but I wanted to illustrate the sample size effect in detail.
Let's compare a percentile-based outlier test (similar to #CTZhu's answer) with a median-absolute-deviation (MAD) test for a variety of different sample sizes:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
def main():
for num in [10, 50, 100, 1000]:
# Generate some data
x = np.random.normal(0, 0.5, num-3)
# Add three outliers...
x = np.r_[x, -3, -10, 12]
plot(x)
plt.show()
def mad_based_outlier(points, thresh=3.5):
if len(points.shape) == 1:
points = points[:,None]
median = np.median(points, axis=0)
diff = np.sum((points - median)**2, axis=-1)
diff = np.sqrt(diff)
med_abs_deviation = np.median(diff)
modified_z_score = 0.6745 * diff / med_abs_deviation
return modified_z_score > thresh
def percentile_based_outlier(data, threshold=95):
diff = (100 - threshold) / 2.0
minval, maxval = np.percentile(data, [diff, 100 - diff])
return (data < minval) | (data > maxval)
def plot(x):
fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=2)
for ax, func in zip(axes, [percentile_based_outlier, mad_based_outlier]):
sns.distplot(x, ax=ax, rug=True, hist=False)
outliers = x[func(x)]
ax.plot(outliers, np.zeros_like(outliers), 'ro', clip_on=False)
kwargs = dict(y=0.95, x=0.05, ha='left', va='top')
axes[0].set_title('Percentile-based Outliers', **kwargs)
axes[1].set_title('MAD-based Outliers', **kwargs)
fig.suptitle('Comparing Outlier Tests with n={}'.format(len(x)), size=14)
main()
Notice that the MAD-based classifier works correctly regardless of sample-size, while the percentile based classifier classifies more points the larger the sample size is, regardless of whether or not they are actually outliers.

Detection of outliers in one dimensional data depends on its distribution
1- Normal Distribution :
Data values are almost equally distributed over the expected range :
In this case you easily use all the methods that include mean ,like the confidence interval of 3 or 2 standard deviations(95% or 99.7%) accordingly for a normally distributed data (central limit theorem and sampling distribution of sample mean).I is a highly effective method.
Explained in Khan Academy statistics and Probability - sampling distribution library.
One other way is prediction interval if you want confidence interval of data points rather than mean.
Data values are are randomly distributed over a range:
mean may not be a fair representation of the data, because the average is easily influenced by outliers (very small or large values in the data set that are not typical)
The median is another way to measure the center of a numerical data set.
Median Absolute deviation - a method which measures the distance of all points from the median in terms of median distance
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/eda/section3/eda35h.htm - has a good explanation as explained in Joe Kington's answer above
2 - Symmetric Distribution : Again Median Absolute Deviation is a good method if the z-score calculation and threshold is changed accordingly
Explanation :
http://eurekastatistics.com/using-the-median-absolute-deviation-to-find-outliers/
3 - Asymmetric Distribution : Double MAD - Double Median Absolute Deviation
Explanation in the above attached link
Attaching my python code for reference :
def is_outlier_doubleMAD(self,points):
"""
FOR ASSYMMETRIC DISTRIBUTION
Returns : filtered array excluding the outliers
Parameters : the actual data Points array
Calculates median to divide data into 2 halves.(skew conditions handled)
Then those two halves are treated as separate data with calculation same as for symmetric distribution.(first answer)
Only difference being , the thresholds are now the median distance of the right and left median with the actual data median
"""
if len(points.shape) == 1:
points = points[:,None]
median = np.median(points, axis=0)
medianIndex = (points.size/2)
leftData = np.copy(points[0:medianIndex])
rightData = np.copy(points[medianIndex:points.size])
median1 = np.median(leftData, axis=0)
diff1 = np.sum((leftData - median1)**2, axis=-1)
diff1 = np.sqrt(diff1)
median2 = np.median(rightData, axis=0)
diff2 = np.sum((rightData - median2)**2, axis=-1)
diff2 = np.sqrt(diff2)
med_abs_deviation1 = max(np.median(diff1),0.000001)
med_abs_deviation2 = max(np.median(diff2),0.000001)
threshold1 = ((median-median1)/med_abs_deviation1)*3
threshold2 = ((median2-median)/med_abs_deviation2)*3
#if any threshold is 0 -> no outliers
if threshold1==0:
threshold1 = sys.maxint
if threshold2==0:
threshold2 = sys.maxint
#multiplied by a factor so that only the outermost points are removed
modified_z_score1 = 0.6745 * diff1 / med_abs_deviation1
modified_z_score2 = 0.6745 * diff2 / med_abs_deviation2
filtered1 = []
i = 0
for data in modified_z_score1:
if data < threshold1:
filtered1.append(leftData[i])
i += 1
i = 0
filtered2 = []
for data in modified_z_score2:
if data < threshold2:
filtered2.append(rightData[i])
i += 1
filtered = filtered1 + filtered2
return filtered

I've adapted the code from http://eurekastatistics.com/using-the-median-absolute-deviation-to-find-outliers and it gives the same results as Joe Kington's, but uses L1 distance instead of L2 distance, and has support for asymmetric distributions. The original R code did not have Joe's 0.6745 multiplier, so I also added that in for consistency within this thread. Not 100% sure if it's necessary, but makes the comparison apples-to-apples.
def doubleMADsfromMedian(y,thresh=3.5):
# warning: this function does not check for NAs
# nor does it address issues when
# more than 50% of your data have identical values
m = np.median(y)
abs_dev = np.abs(y - m)
left_mad = np.median(abs_dev[y <= m])
right_mad = np.median(abs_dev[y >= m])
y_mad = left_mad * np.ones(len(y))
y_mad[y > m] = right_mad
modified_z_score = 0.6745 * abs_dev / y_mad
modified_z_score[y == m] = 0
return modified_z_score > thresh

Well a simple solution can also be, removing something which outside 2 standard deviations(or 1.96):
import random
def outliers(tmp):
"""tmp is a list of numbers"""
outs = []
mean = sum(tmp)/(1.0*len(tmp))
var = sum((tmp[i] - mean)**2 for i in range(0, len(tmp)))/(1.0*len(tmp))
std = var**0.5
outs = [tmp[i] for i in range(0, len(tmp)) if abs(tmp[i]-mean) > 1.96*std]
return outs
lst = [random.randrange(-10, 55) for _ in range(40)]
print lst
print outliers(lst)

Use np.percentile as #Martin suggested:
percentiles = np.percentile(data, [2.5, 97.5])
# or =>, <= for within 95%
data[(percentiles[0]<data) & (percentiles[1]>data)]
# set the outliners to np.nan
data[(percentiles[0]>data) | (percentiles[1]<data)] = np.nan