Getting a power spectrum on data with an irregular time base - signal-processing

I have an array of charlie = array ([ [time, value], [time ,value] , [time,value], ...etc]). The time intervals are not regular.
I am not yet sufficiently familiar with sp = np.fft.fft( charlie ), or similar, to crack the nut on my own.
How can I extract the periodic feature of the values over time and then plot it in an easy to read form?

You can try a discrete Fourier transformation with non equal time steps.
Asume you have N data pairs: (t0, x0), (t1, x1), ... (tN-1, xN-1).
The order of time has to be monotonic increasing: t0 < t1, t1 < t2, ..., tN-2 < tN-1
For a FFT the data set is interpreted as one period of a periodic function, so xN = x0 and tN = t0.

You can try using a polynomial interpolator to interpolate a set of equal time spaced samples, before you use an FFT.

Related

Misconceptions about the Shannon-Nyquist theorem

I am a student working with time-series data which we feed into a neural network for classification (my task is to build and train this NN).
We're told to use a band-pass filter of 10 Hz to 150 Hz since anything outside that is not interesting.
After applying the band-pass, I've also down-sampled the data to 300 samples per second (originally it was 768 Hz). My understanding of the Shannon Nyquist sampling theorem is that, after applying the band-pass, any information in the data will be perfectly preserved at this sample-rate.
However, I got into a discussion with my supervisor who claimed that 300 Hz might not be sufficient even if the signal was band-limited. She says that it is only the minimum sample rate, not necessarily the best sample rate.
My understanding of the sampling theorem makes me think the supervisor is obviously wrong, but I don't want to argue with my supervisor, especially in case I'm actually the one who has misunderstood.
Can anyone help to confirm my understanding or provide some clarification? And how should I take this up with my supervisor (if at all).
The Nyquist-Shannon theorem states that the sampling frequency should at-least be twice of bandwidth, i.e.,
fs > 2B
So, this is the minimal criteria. If the sampling frequency is less than 2B then there will be aliasing. There is no upper limit on sampling frequency, but more the sampling frequency, the better will be the reconstruction.
So, I think your supervisor is right in saying that it is the minimal condition and not the best one.
Actually, you and your supervisor are both wrong. The minimum sampling rate required to faithfully represent a real-valued time series whose spectrum lies between 10 Hz and 150 Hz is 140 Hz, not 300 Hz. I'll explain this, and then I'll explain some of the context that shows why you might want to "oversample", as it is referred to (spoiler alert: Bailian-Low Theorem). The supervisor is mixing folklore into the discussion, and when folklore is not properly-contexted, it tends to telephone tag into fakelore. (That's a common failing even in the peer-reviewed literature, by the way). And there's a lot of fakelore, here, that needs to be defogged.
For the following, I will use the following conventions.
There's no math layout on Stack Overflow (except what we already have with UTF-8), so ...
a^b denotes a raised to the power b.
∫_I (⋯x⋯) dx denotes an integral of (⋯x⋯) taken over all x ∈ I, with the default I = ℝ.
The support supp φ (or supp_x φ(x) to make the "x" explicit) of a function φ(x) is the smallest closed set containing all the x-es for which φ(x) ≠ 0. For regularly-behaving (e.g. continuously differentiable) functions that means a union of closed intervals and/or half-rays or the whole real line, itself. This figures centrally in the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem, as its main condition is that a spectrum have bounded support; i.e. a "finite bandwidth".
For the Fourier transform I will use the version that has the 2π up in the exponent, and for added convenience, I will use the convention 1^x = e^{2πix} = cos(2πx) + i sin(2πx) (which I refer to as the Ramanujan Convention, as it is the convention I frequently used in my previous life oops I mean which Ramanujan secretly used in his life to make the math a whole lot simpler).
The set ℤ = {⋯, -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, ⋯ } is the integers, and 1^{x+z} = 1^x for all z∈ℤ - making 1^x the archetype of a periodic function whose period is 1.
Thus, the Fourier transform f̂(ν) of a function f(t) and its inverse are given by:
f̂(ν) = ∫ f(t) 1^{-νt} dt, f(t) = ∫ f̂(ν) 1^{+νt} dν.
The spectrum of the time series given by the function f(t) is the function f̂(ν) of the cyclic frequency ν, which is what is measured in Hertz (Hz.); t, itself, being measured in seconds. A common convention is to use the angular frequency ω = 2πν, instead, but that muddies the picture.
The most important example, with respect to the issue at hand, is the Fourier transform χ̂_Ω of the interval function given by χ_Ω(t) = 1 if t ∈ [-½Ω,+½Ω] and χ_Ω(t) = 0 else:
χ̂_Ω(t) = ∫_[-½Ω,+½Ω] 1^ν dν
= {1^{+½Ω} - 1^{-½Ω}}/{2πi}
= {2i sin πΩ}/{2πi}
= Ω sinc πΩ
which is where the function sinc x = (sin πx)/(πx) comes into play.
The cardinal form of the sampling theorem is that a function f(t) can be sampled over an equally-spaced sampled domain T ≡ { kΔt: k ∈ ℤ }, if its spectrum is bounded by supp f̂ ⊆ [-½Ω,+½Ω] ⊆ [-1/(2Δt),+1/(2Δt)], with the sampling given as
f(t) = ∑_{t'∈T} f(t') Ω sinc(Ω(t - t')) Δt.
So, this generally applies to [over-]sampling with redundancy factors 1/(ΩΔt) ≥ 1. In the special case where the sampling is tight with ΩΔt = 1, then it reduces to the form
f(t) = ∑_{t'∈T} f(t') sinc({t - t'}/Δt).
In our case, supp f̂ = [10 Hz., 150 Hz.] so the tightest fits are with 1/Δt = Ω = 300 Hz.
This generalizes to equally-spaced sampled domains of the form T ≡ { t₀ + kΔt: k ∈ ℤ } without any modification.
But it also generalizes to frequency intervals supp f̂ = [ν₋,ν₊] of width Ω = ν₊ - ν₋ and center ν₀ = ½ (ν₋ + ν₊) to the following form:
f(t) = ∑_{t'∈T} f(t') 1^{ν₀(t - t')} Ω sinc(Ω(t - t')) Δt.
In your case, you have ν₋ = 10 Hz., ν₊ = 150 Hz., Ω = 140 Hz., ν₀ = 80 Hz. with the condition Δt ≤ 1/140 second, a sampling rate of at least 140 Hz. with
f(t) = (140 Δt) ∑_{t'∈T} f(t') 1^{80(t - t')} sinc(140(t - t')).
where t and Δt are in seconds.
There is a larger context to all of this. One of the main places where this can be used is for transforms devised from an overlapping set of windowed filters in the frequency domain - a typical case in point being transforms for the time-scale plane, like the S-transform or the continuous wavelet transform.
Since you want the filters to be smoothly-windowed functions, without sharp corners, then in order for them to provide a complete set that adds up to a finite non-zero value over all of the frequency spectrum (so that they can all be normalized, in tandem, by dividing out by this sum), then their respective supports have to overlap.
(Edit: Generalized this example to cover both equally-spaced and logarithmic-spaced intervals.)
One example of such a set would be filters that have end-point frequencies taken from the set
Π = { p₀ (α + 1)ⁿ + β {(α + 1)ⁿ - 1} / α: n ∈ {0,1,2,⋯} }
So, for interval n (counting from n = 0), you would have ν₋ = p_n and ν₊ = p_{n+1}, where the members of Π are enumerated
p_n = p₀ (α + 1)ⁿ + β {(α + 1)ⁿ - 1} / α,
Δp_n = p_{n+1} - p_n = α p_n + β = (α p₀ + β)(α + 1)ⁿ,
n ∈ {0,1,2,⋯}
The center frequency of interval n would then be ν₀ = p_n + ½ Δp₀ (α + 1)ⁿ and the width would be Ω = Δp₀ (α + 1)ⁿ, but the actual support for the filter would overlap into a good part of the neighboring intervals, so that when you add up the filters that cover a given frequency ν the sum doesn't drop down to 0 as ν approaches any of the boundary points. (In the limiting case α → 0, this produces an equally-spaced frequency domain, suitable for an equalizer, while in the case β → 0, it produces a logarithmic scale with base α + 1, where octaves are equally-spaced.)
The other main place where you may apply this is to time-frequency analysis and spectrograms. Here, the role of a function f and its Fourier transform f̂ are reversed and the role of the frequency bandwidth Ω is now played by the (reciprocal) time bandwidth 1/Ω. You want to break up a time series, given by a function f(t) into overlapping segments f̃(q,λ) = g(λ)* f(q + λ), with smooth windowing given by the functions g(λ) with bounded support supp g ⊆ [-½ 1/Ω, +½ 1/Ω], and with interval spacing Δq much larger than the time sampling Δt (the ratio Δq/Δt is called the "hop" factor). The analogous role of Δt is played, here, by the frequency interval in the spectrogram Δp = Ω, which is now constant.
Edit: (Fixed the numbers for the Audacity example)
The minimum sampling rate for both supp_λ g and supp_λ f(q,λ) is Δq = 1/Ω = 1/Δp, and the corresponding redundancy factor is 1/(ΔpΔq). Audacity, for instance, uses a redundancy factor of 2 for its spectrograms. A typical value for Δp might be 44100/2048 Hz., while the time-sampling rate is Δt = 1/(2×3×5×7)² second (corresponding to 1/Δt = 44100 Hz.). With a redundancy factor of 2, Δq would be 1024/44100 second and the hop factor would be Δq/Δt = 1024.
If you try to fit the sampling windows, in either case, to the actual support of the band-limited (or time-limited) function, then the windows won't overlap and the only way to keep their sum from dropping to 0 on the boundary points would be for the windowing functions to have sharp corners on the boundaries, which would wreak havoc on their corresponding Fourier transforms.
The Balian-Low Theorem makes the actual statement on the matter.
https://encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Balian-Low_theorem
And a shout-out to someone I've been talking with, recently, about DSP-related matters and his monograph, which provides an excellent introductory reference to a lot of the issues discussed here.
A Friendly Guide To Wavelets
Gerald Kaiser
Birkhauser 1994
He said it's part of a trilogy, another installment of which is forthcoming.

Vectorizing distance to several points on Octave (Matlab)

I'm writing a k-means algorithm. At each step, I want to compute the distance of my n points to k centroids, without a for loop, and for d dimensions.
The problem is I have a hard time splitting on my number of dimensions with the Matlab functions I know. Here is my current code, with x being my n 2D-points and y my k centroids (also 2D-points of course), and with the points distributed along dimension 1, and the spatial coordinates along the dimension 2:
dist = #(a,b) (a - b).^2;
dx = bsxfun(dist, x(:,1), y(:,1)'); % x is (n,1) and y is (1,k)
dy = bsxfun(dist, x(:,2), y(:,2)'); % so the result is (n,k)
dists = dx + dy; % contains the square distance of each points to the k centroids
[_,l] = min(dists, [], 2); % we then argmin on the 2nd dimension
How to vectorize furthermore ?
First edit 3 days later, searching on my own
Since asking this question I made progress on my own towards vectorizing this piece of code.
The code above runs in approximately 0.7 ms on my example.
I first used repmat to make it easy to do broadcasting:
dists = permute(permute(repmat(x,1,1,k), [3,2,1]) - y, [3,2,1]).^2;
dists = sum(dists, 2);
[~,l] = min(dists, [], 3);
As expected it is slightly slower since we replicate the matrix, it runs at 0.85 ms.
From this example it was pretty easy to use bsxfun for the whole thing, but it turned out to be extremely slow, running in 150 ms so more than 150 times slower than the repmat version:
dist = #(a, b) (a - b).^2;
dists = permute(bsxfun(dist, permute(x, [3, 2, 1]), y), [3, 2, 1]);
dists = sum(dists, 2);
[~,l] = min(dists, [], 3);
Why is it so slow ? Isn't vectorizing always an improvement on speed, since it uses vector instructions on the CPU ? I mean of course simple for loops could be optimized to use it aswell, but how can vectorizing make the code slower ? Did I do it wrong ?
Using a for loop
For the sake of completeness, here's the for loop version of my code, surprisingly the fastest running in 0.4 ms, not sure why..
for i=1:k
dists(:,i) = sum((x - y(i,:)).^2, 2);
endfor
[~,l] = min(dists, [], 2);
Note: This answer was written when the question was also tagged MATLAB. Links to Octave documentation added after the MATLAB tag was removed.
You can use the pdist2MATLAB/Octave function to calculate pairwise distances between two sets of observations.
This way, you offload the bother of vectorization to the people who wrote MATLAB/Octave (and they have done a pretty good job of it)
X = rand(10,3);
Y = rand(5,3);
D = pdist2(X, Y);
D is now a 10x5 matrix where the i, jth element is the distance between the ith X and jth Y point.
You can pass it the kind of distance you want as the third argument -- e.g. 'euclidean', 'minkowski', etc, or you could pass a function handle to your custom function like so:
dist = #(a,b) (a - b).^2;
D = pdist2(X, Y, dist);
As saastn mentions, pdist2(..., 'smallest', k) makes things easier in k-means. This returns just the smallest k values from each column of pdist2's result. Octave doesn't have this functionality, but it's easily replicated using sort()MATLAB/Octave.
D_smallest = sort(D);
D_smallest = D_smallest(1:k, :);

arbitrarily weighted moving average (low- and high-pass filters)

Given input signal x (e.g. a voltage, sampled thousand times per second couple of minutes long), I'd like to calculate e.g.
/ this is not q
y[3] = -3*x[0] - x[1] + x[2] + 3*x[3]
y[4] = -3*x[1] - x[2] + x[3] + 3*x[4]
. . .
I'm aiming for variable window length and weight coefficients. How can I do it in q? I'm aware of mavg and signal processing in q and moving sum qidiom
In the DSP world it's called applying filter kernel by doing convolution. Weight coefficients define the kernel, which makes a high- or low-pass filter. The example above calculates the slope from last four points, placing the straight line via least squares method.
Something like this would work for parameterisable coefficients:
q)x:10+sums -1+1000?2f
q)f:{sum x*til[count x]xprev\:y}
q)f[3 1 -1 -3] x
0n 0n 0n -2.385585 1.423811 2.771659 2.065391 -0.951051 -1.323334 -0.8614857 ..
Specific cases can be made a bit faster (running 0 xprev is not the best thing)
q)g:{prev[deltas x]+3*x-3 xprev x}
q)g[x]~f[3 1 -1 -3]x
1b
q)\t:100000 f[3 1 1 -3] x
4612
q)\t:100000 g x
1791
There's a kx white paper of signal processing in q if this area interests you: https://code.kx.com/q/wp/signal-processing/
This may be a bit old but I thought I'd weigh in. There is a paper I wrote last year on signal processing that may be of some value. Working purely within KDB, dependent on the signal sizes you are using, you will see much better performance with a FFT based convolution between the kernel/window and the signal.
However, I've only written up a simple radix-2 FFT, although in my github repo I do have the untested work for a more flexible Bluestein algorithm which will allow for more variable signal length. https://github.com/callumjbiggs/q-signals/blob/master/signal.q
If you wish to go down the path of performing a full manual convolution by a moving sum, then the best method would be to break it up into blocks equal to the kernel/window size (which was based on some work Arthur W did many years ago)
q)vec:10000?100.0
q)weights:30?1.0
q)wsize:count weights
q)(weights$(((wsize-1)#0.0),vec)til[wsize]+) each til count v
32.5931 75.54583 100.4159 124.0514 105.3138 117.532 179.2236 200.5387 232.168.
If your input list not big then you could use the technique mentioned here:
https://code.kx.com/q/cookbook/programming-idioms/#how-do-i-apply-a-function-to-a-sequence-sliding-window
That uses 'scan' adverb. As that process creates multiple lists which might be inefficient for big lists.
Other solution using scan is:
q)f:{sum y*next\[z;x]} / x-input list, y-weights, z-window size-1
q)f[x;-3 -1 1 3;3]
This function also creates multiple lists so again might not be very efficient for big lists.
Other option is to use indices to fetch target items from the input list and perform the calculation. This will operate only on input list.
q) f:{[l;w;i]sum w*l i+til 4} / w- weight, l- input list, i-current index
q) f[x;-3 -1 1 3]#'til count x
This is a very basic function. You can add more variables to it as per your requirements.

Compute annual mean using x-arrays

I have a python xarray dataset with time,x,y for its dimensions and value1 as its variable. I'm trying to compute annual mean of value1 for each x,y coordinate pair.
I've run into this function while reading the docs:
ds.groupby('time.year').mean()
This seems to compute a single annual mean for all x,y coordinate pairs in value1 at each given time slice
rather than the annual means of individual x,y coordinate pairs at each given time slice.
While the code snippet above produces the wrong output, I'm very interested in its oversimplified form. I would really like to figure out the "X-arrays trick" to doing annual mean for a given x,y coordinate pair rather than hacking it together myself.
Cam someone point me in the right direction? Should I temporarily turn this into a pandas object?
To avoid the default of averaging over all dimensions, you simply need to supply the dimension you want to average over explicitly:
ds.groupby('time.year').mean('time')
Note, that calling ds.groupby('time.year').mean('time') will be incorrect if you are working with monthly and not daily data. Taking the mean will place equal weight on months of different length, e.g., Feb and July, which is wrong.
Instead use below from NCAR:
def weighted_temporal_mean(ds, var):
"""
weight by days in each month
"""
# Determine the month length
month_length = ds.time.dt.days_in_month
# Calculate the weights
wgts = month_length.groupby("time.year") / month_length.groupby("time.year").sum()
# Make sure the weights in each year add up to 1
np.testing.assert_allclose(wgts.groupby("time.year").sum(xr.ALL_DIMS), 1.0)
# Subset our dataset for our variable
obs = ds[var]
# Setup our masking for nan values
cond = obs.isnull()
ones = xr.where(cond, 0.0, 1.0)
# Calculate the numerator
obs_sum = (obs * wgts).resample(time="AS").sum(dim="time")
# Calculate the denominator
ones_out = (ones * wgts).resample(time="AS").sum(dim="time")
# Return the weighted average
return obs_sum / ones_out
average_weighted_temp = weighted_temporal_mean(ds_first_five_years, 'TEMP')

vDSP_fft_zrip understanding the transformed DSPSplitComplex content

Assuming "A" is a real vector packed (with vDSP_ctoz) in the proper way, doing:
vDSP_fft_zrip(setupReal, &A, 1, FFT_LENGTH_LOG2, FFT_FORWARD);
Will transform my real content to it's frequency representation.
What do then the following values represents ?:
A.realp[0];
A.imagp[0];
A.realp[i];
A.imagp[i];
A.realp[N-1];
A.imagp[N-1];
Actually I'm wondering where is the DC and Nyquist components stored. Also is the A.imagp[j] the imaginary part of A.realp[j] ?
Let H be the vector that is the mathematical result of the FFT, so that Hk is the kth element of the vector. H0 is the DC component, and HN/2 is the Nyquist component. Then:
A.realp[0] contains H0.
A.imagp[0] contains HN/2.
For 0 < k < N/2, A.realp[k] and A.imagp[k] combined contain Hk. Specifically, A.realp[k] contains the real part of Hk, and A.imagp[k] contains the imaginary part of Hk. Equivalently, Hk = A.realp[k] + i • A.imagp[k].
Some documentation about the vDSP FFTs is here.

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