Develop Reference

Chi Squared Analysis on Data sets that don't have matching frequencies

I have 15 data sets each of which I have fitted with a curve. Now I am trying to determine the quality of fit by doing a chi-squared test; however, when I run my code:
chi, p_value = stats.chisquare(n, y)
where n is the actual data and y is the predicted data, I get the error
For each axis slice, the sum of the observed frequencies must agree with the sum of the expected frequencies to a relative tolerance of 1e-08, but the percent differences are:
0.1350785306607008
I can't seem to understand why they have to add up to the same total - are there any ways I can run a chi-squared test without muddling my data?

This chi-squared test for goodness of fit indeed requires the sums of both inputs to be (almost) the same. So, if you want to check whether your model fits the observations n well, you have to adjust the counts y of your model as described e.g. here. This could be done with a small wrapper:
from scipy.stats import chisquare
import numpy as np
def cs(n, y):
return chisquare(n, np.sum(n)/np.sum(y) * y)
Another possibility would be to go for R and use chisq.test.

How to calculate one-sided tolerance interval with scipy

I would like to calculate a one sided tolerance bound based on the normal distribution given a data set with known N (sample size), standard deviation, and mean.
If the interval were two sided I would do the following:
conf_int = stats.norm.interval(alpha, loc=mean, scale=sigma)
In my situation, I am bootstrapping samples, but if I weren't I would refer to this post on stackoverflow: Correct way to obtain confidence interval with scipy and use the following: conf_int = stats.norm.interval(0.68, loc=mean, scale=sigma / np.sqrt(len(a)))
How would you do the same thing, but to calculate this as a one sided bound (95% of values are above or below x<--bound)?

I assume that you are interested in computing one-side tolerance bound using the normal distribution (based on the fact you mention the scipy.stats.norm.interval function as the two-sided equivalent of your need).
Then the good news is that, based on the tolerance interval Wikipedia page:
One-sided normal tolerance intervals have an exact solution in terms of the sample mean and sample variance based on the noncentral t-distribution.
(FYI: Unfortunately, this is not the case for the two-sided setting)
This assertion is based on this paper. Besides paragraph 4.8 (page 23) provides the formulas.
The bad news is that I do not think there is a ready-to-use scipy function that you can safely tweak and use for your purpose.
But you can easily calculate it yourself. You can find on Github repositories that contain such a calculator from which you can find inspiration, for example that one from which I built the following illustrative example:
import numpy as np
from scipy.stats import norm, nct
# sample size
n=1000
# Percentile for the TI to estimate
p=0.9
# confidence level
g = 0.95
# a demo sample
x = np.array([np.random.normal(100) for k in range(n)])
# mean estimate based on the sample
mu_est = x.mean()
# standard deviation estimated based on the sample
sigma_est = x.std(ddof=1)
# (100*p)th percentile of the standard normal distribution
zp = norm.ppf(p)
# gth quantile of a non-central t distribution
# with n-1 degrees of freedom and non-centrality parameter np.sqrt(n)*zp
t = nct.ppf(g, df=n-1., nc=np.sqrt(n)*zp)
# k factor from Young et al paper
k = t / np.sqrt(n)
# One-sided tolerance upper bound
conf_upper_bound = mu_est + (k*sigma_est)

Here is a one-line solution with the openturns library, assuming your data is a numpy array named sample.
import openturns as ot
ot.NormalFactory().build(sample.reshape(-1, 1)).computeQuantile(0.95)
Let us unpack this. NormalFactory is a class designed to fit the parameters of a Normal distribution (mu and sigma) on a given sample: NormalFactory() creates an instance of this class.
The method build does the actual fitting and returns an object of the class Normal which represents the normal distribution with parameters mu and sigma estimated from the sample.
The sample reshape is there to make sure that OpenTURNS understands that the input sample is a collection of one-dimension points, not a single multi-dimensional point.
The class Normal then provides the method computeQuantile to compute any quantile of the distribution (the 95-th percentile in this example).
This solution does not compute the exact tolerance bound because it uses a quantile from a Normal distribution instead of a Student t-distribution. Effectively, that means that it ignores the estimation error on mu and sigma. In practice, this is only an issue for really small sample sizes.
To illustrate this, here is a comparison between the PDF of the standard normal N(0,1) distribution and the PDF of the Student t-distribution with 19 degrees of freedom (this means a sample size of 20). They can barely be distinguished.
deg_freedom = 19
graph = ot.Normal().drawPDF()
student = ot.Student(deg_freedom).drawPDF().getDrawable(0)
student.setColor('blue')
graph.add(student)
graph.setLegends(['Normal(0,1)', 't-dist k={}'.format(deg_freedom)])
graph

How to sample from a custom distribution when parameters are known?

The target is to get samples from a distribution whose parameters is known.
For example, the self-defined distribution is p(X|theta), where theta the parameter vector of K dimensions and X is the random vector of N dimensions.
Now we know (1) the theta is known; (2) p(X|theta) is NOT known, but I know p(X|theta) ∝ f(X,theta), and f is a known function.
Can pymc3 do such sampling from p(X|theta), and how?
The purpose is not sampling from posterior distribution of parameters, but want to samples from a self-defined distribution.
Starting from a simple example of sampling from a Bernoulli distribution. I did the following:
import pymc3 as pm
import numpy as np
import scipy.stats as stats
import pandas as pd
import theano.tensor as tt
with pm.Model() as model1:
p=0.3
density = pm.DensityDist('density',
lambda x1: tt.switch( x1, tt.log(p), tt.log(1 - p) ),
) #tt.switch( x1, tt.log(p), tt.log(1 - p) ) is the log likelihood from pymc3 source code
with model1:
step = pm.Metropolis()
samples = pm.sample(1000, step=step)
I expect the result is 1000 binary digits, with the proportion of 1 is about 0.3. However, I got strange results where very large numbers occur in the output.
I know something is wrong. Please help on how to correctly write pymc3 codes for such non-posterior MCMC sampling questions.

Prior predictive sampling (for which you should be using pm.sample_prior_predictive()) involves only using the RNGs provided by the RandomVariable objects in your compute graph. By default, DensityDist does not implement a RNG, but does provide the random parameter for this purpose, so you'll need to use that. The log-likelihood is only evaluated with respect to observables, so it plays no role here.
A simple way to generate a valid RNG for an arbitrary distribution is to use inverse transform sampling. In this case, one samples a uniform distribution on the unit interval and then transforms it through the inverse CDF of the desired function. For the Bernoulli case, the inverse CDF partitions the unit line based on the probability of success, assigning 0 to one part and 1 to the other.
Here is a factory-like implementation that creates a Bernoulli RNG compatible with pm.DensityDist's random parameter (i.e., accepts point and size kwargs).
def get_bernoulli_rng(p=0.5):
def _rng(point=None, size=1):
# Bernoulli inverse CDF, given p (prob of success)
_icdf = lambda q: np.uint8(q < p)
return _icdf(pm.Uniform.dist().random(point=point, size=size))
return _rng
So, to fill out the example, it would go something like
with pm.Model() as m:
p = 0.3
y = pm.DensityDist('y', lambda x: tt.switch(x, tt.log(p), tt.log(1-p)),
random=get_bernoulli_rng(p))
prior = pm.sample_prior_predictive(random_seed=2019)
prior['y'].mean() # 0.306
Obviously, this could equally be done with random=pm.Bernoulli.dist(p).random, but the above illustrates generically how one could do this with arbitrary distributions, given their inverse CDF, i.e., you only need to modify _icdf and the parameters.

is seaborn confidence interval computed correctly?

First, I must admit that my statistics knowledge is rusty at best: even when it was shining new, it's not a discipline I particularly liked, which means I had a hard time making sense of it.
Nevertheless, I took a look at how the barplot graphs were calculating error bars, and was surprised to find a "confidence interval" (CI) used instead of (the more common) standard deviation. Researching more CI led me to this wikipedia article which seems to say that, basically, a CI is computed as:
Or, in pseudocode:
def ci_wp(a):
"""calculate confidence interval using Wikipedia's formula"""
m = np.mean(a)
s = 1.96*np.std(a)/np.sqrt(len(a))
return m - s, m + s
But what we find in seaborn/utils.py is:
def ci(a, which=95, axis=None):
"""Return a percentile range from an array of values."""
p = 50 - which / 2, 50 + which / 2
return percentiles(a, p, axis)
Now maybe I'm missing this completely, but this seems just like a completely different calculation than the one proposed by Wikipedia. Can anyone explain this discrepancy?
To give another example, from comments, why do we get so different results between:
>>> sb.utils.ci(np.arange(100))
array([ 2.475, 96.525])
>>> ci_wp(np.arange(100))
[43.842250270646467,55.157749729353533]
And to compare with other statistical tools:
def ci_std(a):
"""calculate margin of error using standard deviation"""
m = np.mean(a)
s = np.std(a)
return m-s, m+s
def ci_sem(a):
"""calculate margin of error using standard error of the mean"""
m = np.mean(a)
s = sp.stats.sem(a)
return m-s, m+s
Which gives us:
>>> ci_sem(np.arange(100))
(46.598850802411796, 52.401149197588204)
>>> ci_std(np.arange(100))
(20.633929952277882, 78.366070047722118)
Or with a random sample:
rng = np.random.RandomState(10)
a = rng.normal(size=100)
print sb.utils.ci(a)
print ci_wp(a)
print ci_sem(a)
print ci_std(a)
... which yields:
[-1.9667006 2.19502303]
(-0.1101230745774124, 0.26895640045116026)
(-0.017774461397903049, 0.17660778727165088)
(-0.88762281417683186, 1.0464561400505796)
Why are Seaborn's numbers so radically different from the other results?

Your calculation using this Wikipedia formula is completely right. Seaborn just uses another method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(statistics). It's well described by Dragicevic [1]:
[It] consists of generating many alternative datasets from the experimental data by randomly drawing observations with replacement. The variability across these datasets is assumed to approximate sampling error and is used to compute so-called bootstrap confidence intervals. [...] It is very versatile and works for many kinds of distributions.
In the Seaborn's source code, a barplot uses estimate_statistic which bootstraps the data then computes the confidence interval on it:
>>> sb.utils.ci(sb.algorithms.bootstrap(np.arange(100)))
array([43.91, 55.21025])
The result is consistent with your calculation.
[1] Dragicevic, P. (2016). Fair statistical communication in HCI. In Modern Statistical Methods for HCI (pp. 291-330). Springer, Cham.

You need to check the code of percentiles. The seaborn ci code you posted simply computes the percentile limits. This interval has a defined mean of 50 (median) and a default range of 95% confidence interval. The actual mean, the standard deviation, etc. will appear in the percentiles routine.

Plotting confidence intervals for Maximum Likelihood Estimate

I am trying to write code to produce confidence intervals for the number of different books in a library (as well as produce an informative plot).
My cousin is at elementary school and every week is given a book by his teacher. He then reads it and returns it in time to get another one the next week. After a while we started noticing that he was getting books he had read before and this became gradually more common over time.
Say the true number of books in the library is N and the teacher picks one uniformly at random (with replacement) to give to you each week. If at week t the number of occasions on which you have received a book you have read is x, then I can produce a maximum likelihood estimate for the number of books in the library following https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/615464/how-many-books-are-in-a-library .
Example: Consider a library with five books A, B, C, D, and E. If you receive books [A, B, A, C, B, B, D] in seven successive weeks, then the value for x (the number of duplicates) will be [0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 3] after each of those weeks, meaning after seven weeks, you have received a book you have already read on three occasions.
To visualise the likelihood function (assuming I have understood what one is correctly) I have written the following code which I believe plots the likelihood function. The maximum is around 135 which is indeed the maximum likelihood estimate according to the MSE link above.
from __future__ import division
import random
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
#N is the true number of books. t is the number of weeks.unk is the true number of repeats found
t = 30
unk = 3
def numberrepeats(N, t):
return t - len(set([random.randint(0,N) for i in xrange(t)]))
iters = 1000
ydata = []
for N in xrange(10,500):
sampledunk = [numberrepeats(N,t) for i in xrange(iters)].count(unk)
ydata.append(sampledunk/iters)
print "MLE is", np.argmax(ydata)
xdata = range(10, 500)
print len(xdata), len(ydata)
plt.plot(xdata,ydata)
plt.show()
The output looks like
My questions are these:
Is there an easy way to get a 95% confidence interval and plot it on the diagram?
How can you superimpose a smoothed curve over the plot?
Is there a better way my code should have been written? It isn't very elegant and is also quite slow.
Finding the 95% confidence interval means finding the range of the x axis so that 95% of the time the empirical maximum likelihood estimate we get by sampling (which should theoretically be 135 in this example) will fall within it. The answer #mbatchkarov has given does not currently do this correctly.
There is now a mathematical answer at https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/656101/how-to-find-a-confidence-interval-for-a-maximum-likelihood-estimate .

Looks like you're ok on the first part, so I'll tackle your second and third points.
There are plenty of ways to fit smooth curves, with scipy.interpolate and splines, or with scipy.optimize.curve_fit. Personally, I prefer curve_fit, because you can supply your own function and let it fit the parameters for you.
Alternatively, if you don't want to learn a parametric function, you could do simple rolling-window smoothing with numpy.convolve.
As for code quality: you're not taking advantage of numpy's speed, because you're doing things in pure python. I would write your (existing) code like this:
from __future__ import division
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# N is the true number of books.
# t is the number of weeks.
# unk is the true number of repeats found
t = 30
unk = 3
def numberrepeats(N, t, iters):
rand = np.random.randint(0, N, size=(t, iters))
return t - np.array([len(set(r)) for r in rand])
iters = 1000
ydata = np.empty(500-10)
for N in xrange(10,500):
sampledunk = np.count_nonzero(numberrepeats(N,t,iters) == unk)
ydata[N-10] = sampledunk/iters
print "MLE is", np.argmax(ydata)
xdata = range(10, 500)
print len(xdata), len(ydata)
plt.plot(xdata,ydata)
plt.show()
It's probably possible to optimize this even more, but this change brings your code's runtime from ~30 seconds to ~2 seconds on my machine.

The a simple (numerical) way to get a confidence interval is simply to run your script many times, and see how much your estimate varies. You can use that standard deviation to calculate the confidence interval.
In the interest of time, another option is to run a bunch of trials at each value of N (I used 2000), and then use random subsampling of those trials to get an estimate of the estimator standard deviation. Basically, this involves selecting a subset of the trials, generating your likelihood curve using that subset, then finding the maximum of that curve to get your estimator. You do this over many subsets and this gives you a bunch of estimators, which you can use to find a confidence interval on your estimator. My full script is as follows:
import numpy as np
t = 30
k = 3
def trial(N):
return t - len(np.unique(np.random.randint(0, N, size=t)))
def trials(N, n_trials):
return np.asarray([trial(N) for i in xrange(n_trials)])
n_trials = 2000
Ns = np.arange(1, 501)
results = np.asarray([trials(N, n_trials=n_trials) for N in Ns])
def likelihood(results):
L = (results == 3).mean(-1)
# boxcar filtering
n = 10
L = np.convolve(L, np.ones(n) / float(n), mode='same')
return L
def max_likelihood_estimate(Ns, results):
i = np.argmax(likelihood(results))
return Ns[i]
def max_likelihood(Ns, results):
# calculate mean from all trials
mean = max_likelihood_estimate(Ns, results)
# randomly subsample results to estimate std
n_samples = 100
sample_frac = 0.25
estimates = np.zeros(n_samples)
for i in xrange(n_samples):
mask = np.random.uniform(size=results.shape[1]) < sample_frac
estimates[i] = max_likelihood_estimate(Ns, results[:,mask])
std = estimates.std()
sterr = std * np.sqrt(sample_frac) # is this mathematically sound?
ci = (mean - 1.96*sterr, mean + 1.96*sterr)
return mean, std, sterr, ci
mean, std, sterr, ci = max_likelihood(Ns, results)
print "Max likelihood estimate: ", mean
print "Max likelihood 95% ci: ", ci
There are two drawbacks to this method. One is that, since you're taking many subsamples from the same set of trials, your estimates are not independent. To limit the effect of this, I only used 25% of the results for each subset. Another drawback is that each subsample is only a fraction of your data, so estimates derived from these subsets will have more variance than estimates derived from running the full script many times. To account for this, I computed the standard error as the standard deviation divided by the square root of 4, since I had four times as much data in my full data set than in one of the subsamples. However, I'm not familiar enough with Monte Carlo theory to know if this is mathematically sound. Running my script a number of times did seem to indicate that my results were reasonable.
Lastly, I did use a boxcar filter on the likelihood curves to smooth them out a bit. Ideally, this should improve results, but even with the filtering there was still a considerable amount of variability in the results. When calculating the value for the overall estimator, I wasn't sure if it would be better compute one likelihood curve from all the results and use the max of that (this is what I ended up doing), or to use the mean of all the subset estimators. Using the mean of the subset estimators might be able to help cancel out some of the roughness in the curves that remains after filtering, but I'm not sure on this.

Here is an answer to your first question and a pointer to a solution for the second:
plot(xdata,ydata)
# calculate the cumulative distribution function
cdf = np.cumsum(ydata)/sum(ydata)
# get the left and right boundary of the interval that contains 95% of the probability mass
right=argmax(cdf>0.975)
left=argmax(cdf>0.025)
# indicate confidence interval with vertical lines
vlines(xdata[left], 0, ydata[left])
vlines(xdata[right], 0, ydata[right])
# hatch confidence interval
fill_between(xdata[left:right], ydata[left:right], facecolor='blue', alpha=0.5)
This produces the following figure:
I'll try to answer question 3 when I have more time :)