Calculate distances among a set of coordinates - python

Is there a more efficient way to calculate the Euclidean distance among a given set of points?
This is the code I use:
def all_distances(position):
distances = np.zeros((N_circles, N_circles))
for i in range(N_circles):
for j in range(i, N_circles):
distances[i][j]=calculate_distance(position[i], position[j])
return distances
def calculate_distance(p1, p2):
return math.sqrt((p1[0]-p2[0])**2+(p1[1]-p2[1])**2)
position is an array containing the coordinates of N_circles points.

You could use pdist and squareform from scipy
from scipy.spatial.distance import pdist, squareform
distances = pdist(position, metric="euclidean")
distance_matrix = squareform(distances)

You can use linalg to calculate the norm. Also you can define a function that calculate a hypersphere equation that include circle
import numpy as np
def distance(w, x, b=0):
w_norm = np.linalg.norm(w,2)
return abs(np.dot(w,x) + b) / w_norm

**2 may use some "power" subroutine. It may be faster to use a multiply.
If there is a hypot() in the library, use it.
You are keeping the distance from i to j (where i <= j). Maybe you want to store [j][i] also?
Alternatively, when looking up the distance you can use min(i,j) to 'max(i,j)`. (I can't tell whether this is less overhead.)
The code seems to compute [i][i]. Won't that always be zero? That is, perhaps you need range(i+1, N_circles). And you may or may not need to store 0.
Do all the distances change every time? If not, is there some way to recompute only the ones that changed? (This is a sample of "out of the box" thinking. There may be other tricks that can be used.)
Here's another...
Don't use SQRT at all. Instead, keep the squared distances. It is sufficient for deciding which is "closer" -- if that is all you need it for. (I used this out-of-the-box trick successfully in one project.)
How many times do you look up a 'distance' before recomputing it? If <= 'once', then don't bother pre-calculating. Simply calculate on the fly. (Actually the cutoff is a little more than 1.0, because of the overhead of creating and maintaining distance[])

Related

Euclidian distance between two python matrixes without double for-loop?

I am working with two numpy matrixes, U (dimensions Nu x 3) and M (dimensions 3 x Nm)
A contains Nu users and 3 features
M contains Nm movies (and the same 3 features)
For each user of U, I would like to calculate its euclidian distance to every movie in M (so I need to compute Nu*Nm euclidian distances).
Is this possible without an explicit double for-loop? I am working with large dimensions matrixes and the double for-loop will probably take too much time.
Thanks in advance.
Check out scipy.spatial.distance.cdist. Something like this will do:
from scipy.spatial.distance import cdist
dist = cdist(U, M.T)
I'm afraid not. You need to compute the euclidian distance for every pair of (user, movie), so you'll have a time complexity of numOfUsers * numOfMovies, which would be a double for loop. You can't do less operations than that, unless you're willing to skip some pairs. The best you can do is optimize the euclidian distance calculation, but the number of operations you're going to do will be quadratic one way or the other.

Large set of x,y coordinates. Efficient way to find any within certain distance of each other?

I have a large set of data points in a pandas dataframe, with columns containing x/y coordinates for these points. I would like to identify all points that are within a certain distance "d" of any other point in the dataframe.
I first tried to do this using 'for' loops, checking the distance between the first point and all other points, then the distance between the second point and all others, etc. Clearly this is not very efficient for a large data set.
Recent searching online suggests that the best way might be to use scipy.spatial.ckdtree, but I can't figure out how to implement this. Most examples I see check against a single x/y location, whereas I want to check all vs all. Is anyone able to provide suggestions or examples, starting from an array of x/y coordinates taken from my dataframe as follows:
points = df_sub.loc[:,['FRONT_X','FRONT_Y']].values
That looks something like this:
[[19091199.587 -544406.722]
[19091161.475 -544452.426]
[19091163.893 -544464.899]
...
[19089150.04 -544747.196]
[19089774.213 -544729.005]
[19089690.516 -545165.489]]
The ideal output would be the ID's of all pairs of points that are within a cutoff distance "d" of each other.
scipy.spatial has many good functions for handling distance computations.
Let's create an array pos of 1000 (x, y) points, similar to what you have in your dataframe.
import numpy as np
from scipy.spatial import distance_matrix
num = 1000
pos = np.random.uniform(size=(num, 2))
# Distance threshold
d = 0.25
From here we shall use the distance_matrix function to calculate pairwise distances. Then we use np.argwhere to find the indices of all the pairwise distances less than some threshold d.
pair_dist = distance_matrix(pos, pos)
ids = np.argwhere(pair_dist < d)
ids now contains the "ID's of all pairs of points that are within a cutoff distance "d" of each other", as you desired.
Shortcomings
Of course, this method has the shortcoming that we always compute the distance between each point and itself (returning a distance of 0), which will always be less than our threshold d. However, we can exclude self-comparisons from our ids with the following fudge:
pair_dist[np.r_[:num], np.r_[:num]] = np.inf
ids = np.argwhere(pair_dist < d)
Another shortcoming is that we compute the full symmetric pairwise distance matrix when we only really need the upper or lower triangular pairwise distance matrix. However, unless this computation really is a bottleneck in your code, I wouldn't worry too much about this.

Find global minimum using scipy.optimize.minimize

Given a 2D point p, I'm trying to calculate the smallest distance between that point and a functional curve, i.e., find the point on the curve which gives me the smallest distance to p, and then calculate that distance. The example function that I'm using is
f(x) = 2*sin(x)
My distance function for the distance between some point p and a provided function is
def dist(p, x, func):
x = np.append(x, func(x))
return sum([[i - j]**2 for i,j in zip(x,p)])
It takes as input, the point p, a position x on the function, and the function handle func. Note this is a squared Euclidean distance (since minimizing in Euclidean space is the same as minimizing in squared Euclidean space).
The crucial part of this is that I want to be able to provide bounds for my function so really I'm finding the closest distance to a function segment. For this example my bounds are
bounds = [0, 2*np.pi]
I'm using the scipy.optimize.minimize function to minimize my distance function, using the bounds. A result of the above process is shown in the graph below.
This is a contour plot showing distance from the sin function. Notice how there appears to be a discontinuity in the contours. For convenience, I've plotted a few points around that discontinuity and the "closet" points on the curve that they map to.
What's actually happening here is that the scipy function is finding a local minimum (given some initial guess), but not a global one and that is causing the discontinuity. I know finding the global minimum of any function is impossible, but I'm looking for a more reliable way to find the global minimum.
Possible methods for finding a global minimum would be
Choose a smart initial guess, but this amounts to knowing approximately where the global minimum is to begin with, which is using the solution of the problem to solve it.
Use a multiple initial guesses and choose the answer which gets to the best minimum. This however seems like a poor choice, especially when my functions get more complicated (and higher dimensional).
Find the minimum, then perturb the solution and find the minimum again, hoping that I may have knocked it into a better minimum. I'm hoping that maybe there is some way to do this simply without evoking some complicated MCMC algorithm or something like that. Speed counts for this process.
Any suggestions about the best way to go about this, or possibly directions to useful functions that may tackle this problem would be great!
As suggest in a comment, you could try a global optimization algorithm such as scipy.optimize.differential_evolution. However, in this case, where you have a well-defined and analytically tractable objective function, you could employ a semi-analytical approach, taking advantage of the first-order necessary conditions for a minimum.
In the following, the first function is the distance metric and the second function is (the numerator of) its derivative w.r.t. x, that should be zero if a minimum occurs at some 0<x<2*np.pi.
import numpy as np
def d(x, p):
return np.sum((p-np.array([x,2*np.sin(x)]))**2)
def diff_d(x, p):
return -2 * p[0] + 2 * x - 4 * p[1] * np.cos(x) + 4 * np.sin(2*x)
Now, given a point p, the only potential minimizers of d(x,p) are the roots of diff_d(x,p) (if any), as well as the boundary points x=0 and x=2*np.pi. It turns out that diff_d may have more than one root. Noting that the derivative is a continuous function, the pychebfun library offers a very efficient method for finding all the roots, avoiding cumbersome approaches based on the scipy root-finding algorithms.
The following function provides the minimum of d(x, p) for a given point p:
import pychebfun
def min_dist(p):
f_cheb = pychebfun.Chebfun.from_function(lambda x: diff_d(x, p), domain = (0,2*np.pi))
potential_minimizers = np.r_[0, f_cheb.roots(), 2*np.pi]
return np.min([d(x, p) for x in potential_minimizers])
Here is the result:

polyfit refining: setting polynomial to be always possitive

I am trying to fit a polynomial to my data, e.g.
import scipy as sp
x = [1,6,9,17,23,28]
y = [6.1, 7.52324, 5.71, 5.86105, 6.3, 5.2]
and say I know the degree of polynomial (e.g.: 3), then I just use scipy.polyfit method to get the polynomial of a given degree:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
fittedModelFunction = sp.polyfit(x, y, 3)
func = sp.poly1d(fittedModelFunction)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
QUESTIONS: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1) How can I tell in addition that the resulting function func must be always positive (i.e. f(x) >= 0 for any x)?
2) How can I further define a constraint (e.g. number of (local) min and max points, etc.) in order to get a better fitting?
Is there smth like this:
http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/scipy-user/2007-July/013138.html
but more accurate?
Always Positve
I haven't been able to find a scipy reference that determines if a function is positive-definite, but an indirect way would be to find the all the roots - Scipy Roots - of the function and inspect the limits near those roots. There are a few cases to consider:
No roots at all
Pick any x and evaluate the function. Since the function does not cross the x-axis because of a lack of roots, any positive result will indicate the function is positive!
Finite number of roots
This is probably the most likely case. You would have to inspect the limits before and after each root - Scipy Limits. You would have to specify your own minimum acceptable delta for the limit however. I haven't seen a 2-sided limit method provided by Scipy, but it looks simple enough to make your own.
from sympy import limit
// f: function, v: variable to limit, p: point, d: delta
// returns two limit values
def twoSidedLimit(f, v, p, d):
return limit(f, v, p-d), limit(f, v, p+d)
Infinite roots
I don't think that polyfit would generate an oscillating function, but this is something to consider. I don't know how to handle this with the method I have already offered... Um, hope it does not happen?
Constraints
The only built-in form of constraints seems to be limited to the optimize library of SciPy. A crude way to enforce constraints for polyfit would be to get the function from polyfit, generate a vector of values for various x, and try to select values from the vector that violate the constraint. If you try to use filter, map, or lambda it may be slow with large vectors since python's filter makes a copy of the list/vector being filtered. I can't really help in this regard.

Using Numpy to find the average distance in a set of points

I have an array of points in unknown dimensional space, such as:
data=numpy.array(
[[ 115, 241, 314],
[ 153, 413, 144],
[ 535, 2986, 41445]])
and I would like to find the average euclidean distance between all points.
Please note that I have over 20,000 points, so I would like to do this as efficiently as possible.
Thanks.
If you have access to scipy, you could try the following:
scipy.spatial.distance.cdist(data,data)
Well, I don't think that there is a super fast way to do this, but this should do it:
tot = 0.
for i in xrange(data.shape[0]-1):
tot += ((((data[i+1:]-data[i])**2).sum(1))**.5).sum()
avg = tot/((data.shape[0]-1)*(data.shape[0])/2.)
Now that you've stated your goal of finding the outliers, you are probably better off computing the sample mean and, with that, the sample variance, since both those operations will give you an O(nd) operation. With that, you should be able to find outliers (e.g. excluding points further from the mean than some fraction of the std. dev.), and that filtering process should be possible to perform in O(nd) time for a total of O(nd).
You might be interested in a refresher on Chebyshev's inequality.
Is it ever worthwhile to optimize without a working solution? Also, computation of a distance matrix over the entire data set rarely needs to be fast because you only do it once--when you need to know a distance between two points, you just look it up, it's already calculated.
So if you don't have a place to start, here's one. If you want to do this in Numpy without the need to write any inline fortran or C, that should be no problem, though perhaps you want to include this small vector-based virtual machine called "numexpr" (available on PyPI, trivial to intall) which in this case gave a 5x performance boost versus Numpy alone.
Below i've calculated a distance matrix for 10,000 points in 2D space (a 10K x 10k matrix giving the distance between all 10k points). This took 59 seconds on my MBP.
import numpy as NP
import numexpr as NE
# data are points in 2D space (x, y)--obviously, this code can accept data of any dimension
x = NP.random.randint(0, 10, 10000)
y = NP.random.randint(0, 10, 10000)
fnx = lambda q : q - NP.reshape(q, (len(q), 1))
delX = fnx(x)
delY = fnx(y)
dist_mat = NE.evaluate("(delX**2 + delY**2)**0.5")
There's no getting around the number of evaluations:
Sum[n-i, {i, 0, n}] = http://www.equationsheet.com/latexrender/pictures/27744c0bd81116aa31c138ab38a2aa87.gif
But you can save yourself the expense of all those square roots if you can get by with an approximate result. It depends on your needs.
If you're going to calculate an average, I would advise you to not try putting all the values into an array before calculating. Just calculate the sum (and sum of squares if you need standard deviation as well) and throw away each value as you calculate it.
Since
and
, I don't know if this means you have to multiply by two somewhere.
If you want a fast and inexact solution, you could probably adapt the Fast Multipole Method algorithm.
Points that are separated by a small distance have a smaller contribution to the final average distance, so it would make sense to group points into clusters and compare the clusters distances.

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