R and Python Give Different Results (Median, IQR, Mean, and STD) - python

I am doing feature scaling on my data and R and Python are giving me different answers in the scaling. R and Python give different answers for the many statistical values:
Median:
Numpy gives 14.948499999999999 with this code:np.percentile(X[:, 0], 50, interpolation = 'midpoint').
The built in Statistics package in Python gives the same answer with the following code: statistics.median(X[:, 0]).
On the other hand, R gives this results 14.9632 with this code: median(X[, 1]). Interestingly, the summary() function in R gives 14.960 as the median.
A similar difference occurs when computing the mean of this same data. R gives 13.10936 using the built-in mean() function and both Numpy and the Python Statistics package give 13.097945407088607.
Again, the same thing happens when computing the Standard Deviation. R gives 7.390328 and Numpy (with DDOF = 1) gives 7.3927612774052083. With DDOF = 0, Numpy gives 7.3927565984408936.
The IQR also gives different results. Using the built-in IQR() function in R, the given results is 12.3468. Using Numpy with this code: np.percentile(X[:, 0], 75) - np.percentile(X[:, 0], 25) the results is 12.358700000000002.
What is going on here? Why are Python and R always giving different results? It may help to know that my data has 795066 rows and is being treated as an np.array() in Python. The same data is being treated as a matrix in R.

tl;dr there are a few potential differences in algorithms even for such simple summary statistics, but given that you're seeing differences across the board and even in relatively simple computations such as the median, I think the problem is more likely that the values are getting truncated/modified/losing precision somehow in the transfer between platforms.
(This is more of an extended comment than an answer, but it was getting awkwardly long.)
you're unlikely to get much farther without a reproducible example; there are various ways to create examples to test hypotheses for the differences, but it's better if you do so yourself rather than making answerers do it.
how are you transferring data to/from Python/R? Is there some rounding in the representation used in the transfer? (What do you get for max/min, which should be based on a single number with no floating-point computations? How about if you drop one value to get an odd-length vector and take the median?)
medians: I was originally going to say that this could be a function of different ways to define quantile interpolation for an even-length vector, but the definition of the median is somewhat simpler than general quantiles, so I'm not sure. The differences you're reporting above seem way too big to be driven by floating-point computation in this case (since the computation is just an average of two values of similar magnitude).
IQRs: similarly, there are different possible definitions of percentiles/quantiles: see ?quantile in R.
median() vs summary(): R's summary() reports values at reduced precision (often useful for a quick overview); this is a common source of confusion.
mean/sd: there are some possible subtleties in the algorithm here -- for example, R sorts the vector before summing uses extended precision internally to reduce instability, I don't know if Python does or not. However, this shouldn't make as big a difference as you're seeing unless the data are a bit weird:
x <- rnorm(1000000,mean=0,sd=1)
> mean(x)
[1] 0.001386724
> sum(x)/length(x)
[1] 0.001386724
> mean(x)-sum(x)/length(x)
[1] -1.734723e-18
Similarly, there are more- and less-stable ways to compute a variance/standard deviation.

Related

What is equivalent to MATLAB griddedInterpolant function in python?

I tried scipy.interpolate.RegularGridInterpolator but MATLAB and python give me results with tiny different (For example: python: -151736.1266937256 MATLAB: -151736.1266989708). And I do care about those different decimals.
Those two functions are equivalent. However, MATLAB's griddedInterpolant has multiple interpolation methods, whilst RegularGridInterpolator only seems to support linear and nearest. With MATLAB, this gives you more possibilities to choose a proper method given your data.
Your two results seem to be accurate to the 12th digit, which in most cases is a good accuracy. The difference between the results is probably due to different implementations of the interpolation method.
If you want accuracy beyond the 12th digit you should rescale your problem so that you only consider the decimals.

Why is numpy's sine function so inaccurate at some points?

I just checked numpy's sine function. Apparently, it produce highly inaccurate results around pi.
In [26]: import numpy as np
In [27]: np.sin(np.pi)
Out[27]: 1.2246467991473532e-16
The expected result is 0. Why is numpy so inaccurate there?
To some extend, I feel uncertain whether it is acceptable to regard the calculated result as inaccurate: Its absolute error comes within one machine epsilon (for binary64), whereas the relative error is +inf -- reason why I feel somewhat confused. Any idea?
[Edit] I fully understand that floating-point calculation can be inaccurate. But most of the floating-point libraries can manage to deliver results within a small range of error. Here, the relative error is +inf, which seems unacceptable. Just imagine that we want to calculate
1/(1e-16 + sin(pi))
The results would be disastrously wrong if we use numpy's implementation.
The main problem here is that np.pi is not exactly π, it's a finite binary floating point number that is close to the true irrational real number π but still off by ~1e-16. np.sin(np.pi) is actually returning a value closer to the true infinite-precision result for sin(np.pi) (i.e. the ideal mathematical sin() function being given the approximated np.pi value) than 0 would be.
The value is dependent upon the algorithm used to compute it. A typical implementation will use some quickly-converging infinite series, carried out until it converges within one machine epsilon. Many modern chips (starting with the Intel 960, I think) had such functions in the instruction set.
To get 0 returned for this, we would need either a notably more accurate algorithm, one that ran extra-precision arithmetic to guarantee the closest-match result, or something that recognizes special cases: detect a multiple of PI and return the exact value.

Inverse Matrix (Numpy) int too large to convert to float

I am trying to take the inverse of a 365x365 matrix. Some of the values get as large as 365**365 and so they are converted to long numbers. I don't know if the linalg.matrix_power() function can handle long numbers. I know the problem comes from this (because of the error message and because my program works just fine for smaller matrices) but I am not sure if there is a way around this. The code needs to work for a NxN matrix.
Here's my code:
item=0
for i in xlist:
xtotal.append(arrayit.arrayit(xlist[item],len(xlist)))
item=item+1
print xtotal
xinverted=numpy.linalg.matrix_power(xtotal,-1)
coeff=numpy.dot(xinverted,ylist)
arrayit.arrayit:
def arrayit(number, length):
newarray=[]
import decimal
i=0
while i!=(length):
newarray.insert(0,decimal.Decimal(number**i))
i=i+1
return newarray;
The program is taking x,y coordinates from a list (list of x's and list of y's) and makes a function.
Thanks!
One thing you might try is the library mpmath, which can do simple matrix algebra and other such problems on arbitrary precision numbers.
A couple of caveats: It will almost certainly be slower than using numpy, and, as Lutzl points out in his answer to this question, the problem may well not be mathematically well defined. Also, you need to decide on the precision you want before you start.
Some brief example code,
from mpmath import mp, matrix
# set the precision - see http://mpmath.org/doc/current/basics.html#setting-the-precision
mp.prec = 5000 # set it to something big at the cost of speed.
# Ideally you'd precalculate what you need.
# a quick trial with 100*100 showed that 5000 works and 500 fails
# see the documentation at http://mpmath.org/doc/current/matrices.html
# where xtotal is the output from arrayit
my_matrix = matrix(xtotal) # I think this should work. If not you'll have to create it and copy
# do the inverse
xinverted = my_matrix**-1
coeff = xinverted*matrix(ylist)
# note that as lutlz pointed out you really want to use solve instead of calculating the inverse.
# I think this is something like
from mpmath import lu_solve
coeff = lu_solve(my_matrix,matrix(ylist))
I suspect your real problem is with the maths rather than the software, so I doubt this will work fantastically well for you, but it's always possible!
Did you ever hear of Lagrange or Newton interpolation? This would avoid the whole construction of the VanderMonde matrix. But not the potentially large numbers in the coefficients.
As a general observation, you do not want the inverse matrix. You do not need to compute it. What you want is to solve a system of linear equations.
x = numpy.linalg.solve(A, b)
solves the system A*x=b.
You (really) might want to look up the Runge effect. Interpolation with equally spaced sample points is an increasingly ill-conditioned task. Useful results can be obtained for single-digit degrees, larger degrees tend to give wildly oscillating polynomials.
You can often use polynomial regression, i.e., approximating your data set by the best polynomial of some low degree.

Chi squared test in Python

I'd like to run a chi-squared test in Python. I've created code to do this, but I don't know if what I'm doing is right, because the scipy docs are quite sparse.
Background first: I have two groups of users. My null hypothesis is that there is no significant difference in whether people in either group are more likely to use desktop, mobile, or tablet.
These are the observed frequencies in the two groups:
[[u'desktop', 14452], [u'mobile', 4073], [u'tablet', 4287]]
[[u'desktop', 30864], [u'mobile', 11439], [u'tablet', 9887]]
Here is my code using scipy.stats.chi2_contingency:
obs = np.array([[14452, 4073, 4287], [30864, 11439, 9887]])
chi2, p, dof, expected = stats.chi2_contingency(obs)
print p
This gives me a p-value of 2.02258737401e-38, which clearly is significant.
My question is: does this code look valid? In particular, I'm not sure whether I should be using scipy.stats.chi2_contingency or scipy.stats.chisquare, given the data I have.
I can't comment too much on the use of the function. However, the issue at hand may be statistical in nature. The very small p-value you are seeing is most likely a result of your data containing large frequencies ( in the order of ten thousand). When sample sizes are too large, any differences will become significant - hence the small p-value. The tests you are using are very sensitive to sample size. See here for more details.
You are using chi2_contingency correctly. If you feel uncertain about the appropriate use of a chi-squared test or how to interpret its result (i.e. your question is about statistical testing rather than coding), consider asking it over at the "CrossValidated" site: https://stats.stackexchange.com/

fft2 different result in numpy and matlab

I was trying to port one code from python to matlab, but I encounter one inconsistence between numpy fft2 and matlab fft2:
peak =
4.377491037053e-223 3.029446976068e-216 ...
1.271610790463e-209 3.237410810582e-203 ...
(Large data can't be list directly, it can be accessed here:https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz1-hopez9CGTFdzU0t3RDAyaHc/edit?usp=sharing)
Matlab:
fft2(peak) --(sample result)
12.5663706143590 -12.4458341615690
-12.4458341615690 12.3264538927637
Python:
np.fft.fft2(peak) --(sample result)
12.56637061 +0.00000000e+00j -12.44583416 +3.42948517e-15j
-12.44583416 +3.35525358e-15j 12.32645389 -6.78073635e-15j
Please help me to explain why, and give suggestion on how to fix it.
The Fourier transform of a real, even function is real and even (ref). Therefore, it appears that your FFT should be real? Numpy is probably just struggling with the numerics while MATLAB may outright check for symmetry and force the solution to be real.
MATLAB uses FFTW3 while my research indicates Numpy uses a library called FFTPack. FFTW is one of the standards for FFT performance and uses a number of tricks to work quickly and perform calculations to the best precision possible. You can incredibly tiny numbers and this offers a number of numerical challenges that any library will be hard pressed to resolve.
You might consider executing the Python code against an FFTW3 wrapper like pyFFTW3 and see if you get similar results.
It appears that your input data is gaussian real and even, in which case we do expect the FFT2 of the signal to be real and even. If all your inputs are this way you could just take the real part. Or round to a certain precision. I would trust MATLAB's FFTW code over the Python code.
Or you could just ignore it. The differences are quite small and a value of 3e-15i is effectively zero for most applications. If you have automated the comparison, consider calling them equivalent if the mean square error of all the entries is less than some threshold (say 1e-8 or 1e-15 or 1e-20).

Categories

Resources