Develop Reference

Understanding dynamic programming approach to solving a problem

I am running through the Project Euler coding archive and have reached problem 115 which reads:
"NOTE: This is a more difficult version of Problem 114.
A row measuring n units in length has red blocks with a minimum length
of m units placed on it, such that any two red blocks (which are
allowed to be different lengths) are separated by at least one black
square.
Let the fill-count function, F(m, n), represent the number of ways
that a row can be filled.
For example, F(3, 29) = 673135 and F(3, 30) = 1089155.
That is, for m = 3, it can be seen that n = 30 is the smallest value
for which the fill-count function first exceeds one million.
In the same way, for m = 10, it can be verified that F(10, 56) =
880711 and F(10, 57) = 1148904, so n = 57 is the least value for which
the fill-count function first exceeds one million.
For m = 50, find the least value of n for which the fill-count
function first exceeds one million."
It was manageable for me to solve this problem using a brute force approach (using three nested for-loops and a wealth of while-loops in between, spanding approx. 50 lines of code). In contrast, I have found this small piece of code, utilizing dynamic programming:
m, n = 50, 168
ways = [1]*(m) + [0]*(n-m+1)
for k in range(m, n+1):
ways[k] = ways[k-1] + sum(ways[:k-m]) + 1
ways[n]
Now this looks quite elegant to me! I understand the technical part of the code, but I don't get how this code solves the problem. Hoping for explanatory help here.

Let ways[k] be the required number of possibilities for a row of length k. For k = 0 up to k = m - 1 we can't place any red blocks, so there's only 1 possibility: placing nothing. Thus we initialise the first m values of ways with 1. For k = m onwards, there are three things that we can do with that k'th unit. Firstly we can set it to black. The total number of ways of doing this is the same as the number of ways of assigning for k - 1, as we're not making any choices about placement beyond the ones for we made for k - 1. The second thing we can do is assign a giant red block for the whole k length. There is exactly 1 way of doing this. The third choice is to assign a red block that doesn't take up the entire row. Let's say the black square which is before the start of this new block (there must always be one, because we've already covered the case of the block spanning the entire region) has index i. We know that i is bounded by i + m < k because the block has to be of length at least m, so by subtracting m we have i < k - m. So for this third case, we want to consider every valid i (starting at i = 0 and up to but not including i = k - m) and add up all the possible ways we can start a red block at i + 1, which is calculated by sum(ways[:k-m]). Adding up each case corresponds to the implemented recurrence: ways[k] = ways[k-1] + sum(ways[:k-m]) + 1. For any n the answer now lies in ways[n]. As a final note, the complexity of this algorithm can be even further improved with a more sophisticated data structure to efficiently answer the prefix sum queries with updates.

how to calculate the minimum unfairness sum of a list

I have tried to summarize the problem statement something like this::
Given n, k and an array(a list) arr where n = len(arr) and k is an integer in set (1, n) inclusive.
For an array (or list) myList, The Unfairness Sum is defined as the sum of the absolute differences between all possible pairs (combinations with 2 elements each) in myList.
To explain: if mylist = [1, 2, 5, 5, 6] then Minimum unfairness sum or MUS. Please note that elements are considered unique by their index in list not their values
MUS = |1-2| + |1-5| + |1-5| + |1-6| + |2-5| + |2-5| + |2-6| + |5-5| + |5-6| + |5-6|
If you actually need to look at the problem statement, It's HERE
My Objective
given n, k, arr(as described above), find the Minimum Unfairness Sum out of all of the unfairness sums of sub arrays possible with a constraint that each len(sub array) = k [which is a good thing to make our lives easy, I believe :) ]
what I have tried
well, there is a lot to be added in here, so I'll try to be as short as I can.
My First approach was this where i used itertools.combinations to get all the possible combinations and statistics.variance to check its spread of data (yeah, I know I'm a mess).
Before you see the code below, Do you think these variance and unfairness sum are perfectly related (i know they are strongly related) i.e. the sub array with minimum variance has to be the sub array with MUS??
You only have to check the LetMeDoIt(n, k, arr) function. If you need MCVE, check the second code snippet below.
from itertools import combinations as cmb
from statistics import variance as varn
def LetMeDoIt(n, k, arr):
v = []
s = []
subs = [list(x) for x in list(cmb(arr, k))] # getting all sub arrays from arr in a list
i = 0
for sub in subs:
if i != 0:
var = varn(sub) # the variance thingy
if float(var) < float(min(v)):
v.remove(v[0])
v.append(var)
s.remove(s[0])
s.append(sub)
else:
pass
elif i == 0:
var = varn(sub)
v.append(var)
s.append(sub)
i = 1
final = []
f = list(cmb(s[0], 2)) # getting list of all pairs (after determining sub array with least MUS)
for r in f:
final.append(abs(r[0]-r[1])) # calculating the MUS in my messy way
return sum(final)
The above code works fine for n<30 but raised a MemoryError beyond that.
In Python chat, Kevin suggested me to try generator which is memory efficient (it really is), but as generator also generates those combination on the fly as we iterate over them, it was supposed to take over 140 hours (:/) for n=50, k=8 as estimated.
I posted the same as a question on SO HERE (you might wanna have a look to understand me properly - it has discussions and an answer by fusion which takes me to my second approach - a better one(i should say fusion's approach xD)).
Second Approach
from itertools import combinations as cmb
def myvar(arr): # a function to calculate variance
l = len(arr)
m = sum(arr)/l
return sum((i-m)**2 for i in arr)/l
def LetMeDoIt(n, k, arr):
sorted_list = sorted(arr) # i think sorting the array makes it easy to get the sub array with MUS quickly
variance = None
min_variance_sub = None
for i in range(n - k + 1):
sub = sorted_list[i:i+k]
var = myvar(sub)
if variance is None or var<variance:
variance = var
min_variance_sub=sub
final = []
f = list(cmb(min_variance_sub, 2)) # again getting all possible pairs in my messy way
for r in f:
final.append(abs(r[0] - r[1]))
return sum(final)
def MainApp():
n = int(input())
k = int(input())
arr = list(int(input()) for _ in range(n))
result = LetMeDoIt(n, k, arr)
print(result)
if __name__ == '__main__':
MainApp()
This code works perfect for n up to 1000 (maybe more), but terminates due to time out (5 seconds is the limit on online judge :/ ) for n beyond 10000 (the biggest test case has n=100000).
=====
How would you approach this problem to take care of all the test cases in given time limits (5 sec) ? (problem was listed under algorithm & dynamic programming)
(for your references you can have a look on
successful submissions(py3, py2, C++, java) on this problem by other candidates - so that you can
explain that approach for me and future visitors)
an editorial by the problem setter explaining how to approach the question
a solution code by problem setter himself (py2, C++).
Input data (test cases) and expected output
Edit1 ::
For future visitors of this question, the conclusions I have till now are,
that variance and unfairness sum are not perfectly related (they are strongly related) which implies that among a lots of lists of integers, a list with minimum variance doesn't always have to be the list with minimum unfairness sum. If you want to know why, I actually asked that as a separate question on math stack exchange HERE where one of the mathematicians proved it for me xD (and it's worth taking a look, 'cause it was unexpected)
As far as the question is concerned overall, you can read answers by archer & Attersson below (still trying to figure out a naive approach to carry this out - it shouldn't be far by now though)
Thank you for any help or suggestions :)

You must work on your list SORTED and check only sublists with consecutive elements. This is because BY DEFAULT, any sublist that includes at least one element that is not consecutive, will have higher unfairness sum.
For example if the list is
[1,3,7,10,20,35,100,250,2000,5000] and you want to check for sublists with length 3, then solution must be one of [1,3,7] [3,7,10] [7,10,20] etc
Any other sublist eg [1,3,10] will have higher unfairness sum because 10>7 therefore all its differences with rest of elements will be larger than 7
The same for [1,7,10] (non consecutive on the left side) as 1<3
Given that, you only have to check for consecutive sublists of length k which reduces the execution time significantly
Regarding coding, something like this should work:
def myvar(array):
return sum([abs(i[0]-i[1]) for i in itertools.combinations(array,2)])
def minsum(n, k, arr):
res=1000000000000000000000 #alternatively make it equal with first subarray
for i in range(n-k):
res=min(res, myvar(l[i:i+k]))
return res

I see this question still has no complete answer. I will write a track of a correct algorithm which will pass the judge. I will not write the code in order to respect the purpose of the Hackerrank challenge. Since we have working solutions.
The original array must be sorted. This has a complexity of O(NlogN)
At this point you can check consecutive sub arrays as non-consecutive ones will result in a worse (or equal, but not better) "unfairness sum". This is also explained in archer's answer
The last check passage, to find the minimum "unfairness sum" can be done in O(N). You need to calculate the US for every consecutive k-long subarray. The mistake is recalculating this for every step, done in O(k), which brings the complexity of this passage to O(k*N). It can be done in O(1) as the editorial you posted shows, including mathematic formulae. It requires a previous initialization of a cumulative array after step 1 (done in O(N) with space complexity O(N) too).
It works but terminates due to time out for n<=10000.
(from comments on archer's question)
To explain step 3, think about k = 100. You are scrolling the N-long array and the first iteration, you must calculate the US for the sub array from element 0 to 99 as usual, requiring 100 passages. The next step needs you to calculate the same for a sub array that only differs from the previous by 1 element 1 to 100. Then 2 to 101, etc.
If it helps, think of it like a snake. One block is removed and one is added.
There is no need to perform the whole O(k) scrolling. Just figure the maths as explained in the editorial and you will do it in O(1).
So the final complexity will asymptotically be O(NlogN) due to the first sort.

speeding up processing 5 million rows of coordinate data

I have a csv file with two columns (latitude, longitude) that contains over 5 million rows of geolocation data.
I need to identify the points which are not within 5 miles of any other point in the list, and output everything back into another CSV that has an extra column (CloseToAnotherPoint) which is True if there is another point is within 5 miles, and False if there isn't.
Here is my current solution using geopy (not making any web calls, just using the function to calculate distance):
from geopy.point import Point
from geopy.distance import vincenty
import csv
class CustomGeoPoint(object):
def __init__(self, latitude, longitude):
self.location = Point(latitude, longitude)
self.close_to_another_point = False
try:
output = open('output.csv','w')
writer = csv.writer(output, delimiter = ',', quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL)
writer.writerow(['Latitude', 'Longitude', 'CloseToAnotherPoint'])
# 5 miles
close_limit = 5
geo_points = []
with open('geo_input.csv', newline='') as geo_csv:
reader = csv.reader(geo_csv)
next(reader, None) # skip the headers
for row in reader:
geo_points.append(CustomGeoPoint(row[0], row[1]))
# for every point, look at every point until one is found within 5 miles
for geo_point in geo_points:
for geo_point2 in geo_points:
dist = vincenty(geo_point.location, geo_point2.location).miles
if 0 < dist <= close_limit: # (0,close_limit]
geo_point.close_to_another_point = True
break
writer.writerow([geo_point.location.latitude, geo_point.location.longitude,
geo_point.close_to_another_point])
finally:
output.close()
As you might be able to tell from looking at it, this solution is extremely slow. So slow in fact that I let it run for 3 days and it still didn't finish!
I've thought about trying to split up the data into chunks (multiple CSV files or something) so that the inner loop doesn't have to look at every other point, but then I would have to figure out how to make sure the borders of each section checked against the borders of its adjacent sections, and that just seems overly complex and I'm afraid it would be more of a headache than it's worth.
So any pointers on how to make this faster?

Let's look at what you're doing.
You read all the points into a list named geo_points.
Now, can you tell me whether the list is sorted? Because if it was sorted, we definitely want to know that. Sorting is valuable information, especially when you're dealing with 5 million of anything.
You loop over all the geo_points. That's 5 million, according to you.
Within the outer loop, you loop again over all 5 million geo_points.
You compute the distance in miles between the two loop items.
If the distance is less than your threshold, you record that information on the first point, and stop the inner loop.
When the inner loop stops, you write information about the outer loop item to a CSV file.
Notice a couple of things. First, you're looping 5 million times in the outer loop. And then you're looping 5 million times in the inner loop.
This is what O(n²) means.
The next time you see someone talking about "Oh, this is O(log n) but that other thing is O(n log n)," remember this experience - you're running an n² algorithm where n in this case is 5,000,000. Sucks, dunnit?
Anyway, you have some problems.
Problem 1: You'll eventually wind up comparing every point against itself. Which should have a distance of zero, meaning they will all be marked as within whatever distance threshold. If your program ever finishes, all the cells will be marked True.
Problem 2: When you compare point #1 with, say, point #12345, and they are within the threshold distance from each other, you are recording that information about point #1. But you don't record the same information about the other point. You know that point #12345 (geo_point2) is reflexively within the threshold of point #1, but you don't write that down. So you're missing a chance to just skip over 5 million comparisons.
Problem 3: If you compare point #1 and point #2, and they are not within the threshold distance, what happens when you compare point #2 with point #1? Your inner loop is starting from the beginning of the list every time, but you know that you have already compared the start of the list with the end of the list. You can reduce your problem space by half just by making your outer loop go i in range(0, 5million) and your inner loop go j in range(i+1, 5million).
Answers?
Consider your latitude and longitude on a flat plane. You want to know if there's a point within 5 miles. Let's think about a 10 mile square, centered on your point #1. That's a square centered on (X1, Y1), with a top left corner at (X1 - 5miles, Y1 + 5miles) and a bottom right corner at (X1 + 5miles, Y1 - 5miles). Now, if a point is within that square, it might not be within 5 miles of your point #1. But you can bet that if it's outside that square, it's more than 5 miles away.
As #SeverinPappadeaux points out, distance on a spheroid like Earth is not quite the same as distance on a flat plane. But so what? Set your square a little bigger to allow for the difference, and proceed!
Sorted List
This is why sorting is important. If all the points were sorted by X, then Y (or Y, then X - whatever) and you knew it, you could really speed things up. Because you could simply stop scanning when the X (or Y) coordinate got too big, and you wouldn't have to go through 5 million points.
How would that work? Same way as before, except your inner loop would have some checks like this:
five_miles = ... # Whatever math, plus an error allowance!
list_len = len(geo_points) # Don't call this 5 million times
for i, pi in enumerate(geo_points):
if pi.close_to_another_point:
continue # Remember if close to an earlier point
pi0max = pi[0] + five_miles
pi1min = pi[1] - five_miles
pi1max = pi[1] + five_miles
for j in range(i+1, list_len):
pj = geo_points[j]
# Assumes geo_points is sorted on [0] then [1]
if pj[0] > pi0max:
# Can't possibly be close enough, nor any later points
break
if pj[1] < pi1min or pj[1] > pi1max:
# Can't be close enough, but a later point might be
continue
# Now do "real" comparison using accurate functions.
if ...:
pi.close_to_another_point = True
pj.close_to_another_point = True
break
What am I doing there? First, I'm getting some numbers into local variables. Then I'm using enumerate to give me an i value and a reference to the outer point. (What you called geo_point). Then, I'm quickly checking to see if we already know that this point is close to another one.
If not, we'll have to scan. So I'm only scanning "later" points in the list, because I know the outer loop scans the early ones, and I definitely don't want to compare a point against itself. I'm using a few temporary variables to cache the result of computations involving the outer loop. Within the inner loop, I do some stupid comparisons against the temporaries. They can't tell me if the two points are close to each other, but I can check if they're definitely not close and skip ahead.
Finally, if the simple checks pass then go ahead and do the expensive checks. If a check actually passes, be sure to record the result on both points, so we can skip doing the second point later.
Unsorted List
But what if the list is not sorted?
#RootTwo points you at a kD tree (where D is for "dimensional" and k in this case is "2"). The idea is really simple, if you already know about binary search trees: you cycle through the dimensions, comparing X at even levels in the tree and comparing Y at odd levels (or vice versa). The idea would be this:
def insert_node(node, treenode, depth=0):
dimension = depth % 2 # even/odd -> lat/long
dn = node.coord[dimension]
dt = treenode.coord[dimension]
if dn < dt:
# go left
if treenode.left is None:
treenode.left = node
else:
insert_node(node, treenode.left, depth+1)
else:
# go right
if treenode.right is None:
treenode.right = node
else:
insert_node(node, treenode.right, depth+1)
What would this do? This would get you a searchable tree where points could be inserted in O(log n) time. That means O(n log n) for the whole list, which is way better than n squared! (The log base 2 of 5 million is basically 23. So n log n is 5 million times 23, compared with 5 million times 5 million!)
It also means you can do a targeted search. Since the tree is ordered, it's fairly straightforward to look for "close" points (the Wikipedia link from #RootTwo provides an algorithm).
Advice
My advice is to just write code to sort the list, if needed. It's easier to write, and easier to check by hand, and it's a separate pass you will only need to make one time.
Once you have the list sorted, try the approach I showed above. It's close to what you were doing, and it should be easy for you to understand and code.

As the answer to Python calculate lots of distances quickly points out, this is a classic use case for k-D trees.
An alternative is to use a sweep line algorithm, as shown in the answer to How do I match similar coordinates using Python?
Here's the sweep line algorithm adapted for your questions. On my laptop, it takes < 5 minutes to run through 5M random points.
import itertools as it
import operator as op
import sortedcontainers # handy library on Pypi
import time
from collections import namedtuple
from math import cos, degrees, pi, radians, sqrt
from random import sample, uniform
Point = namedtuple("Point", "lat long has_close_neighbor")
miles_per_degree = 69
number_of_points = 5000000
data = [Point(uniform( -88.0, 88.0), # lat
uniform(-180.0, 180.0), # long
True
)
for _ in range(number_of_points)
]
start = time.time()
# Note: lat is first in Point, so data is sorted by .lat then .long.
data.sort()
print(time.time() - start)
# Parameter that determines the size of a sliding lattitude window
# and therefore how close two points need to be to be to get flagged.
threshold = 5.0 # miles
lat_span = threshold / miles_per_degree
coarse_threshold = (.98 * threshold)**2
# Sliding lattitude window. Within the window, observations are
# ordered by longitude.
window = sortedcontainers.SortedListWithKey(key=op.attrgetter('long'))
# lag_pt is the 'southernmost' point within the sliding window.
point = iter(data)
lag_pt = next(point)
milepost = len(data)//10
# lead_pt is the 'northernmost' point in the sliding window.
for i, lead_pt in enumerate(data):
if i == milepost:
print('.', end=' ')
milepost += len(data)//10
# Dec of lead_obs represents the leading edge of window.
window.add(lead_pt)
# Remove observations further than the trailing edge of window.
while lead_pt.lat - lag_pt.lat > lat_span:
window.discard(lag_pt)
lag_pt = next(point)
# Calculate 'east-west' width of window_size at dec of lead_obs
long_span = lat_span / cos(radians(lead_pt.lat))
east_long = lead_pt.long + long_span
west_long = lead_pt.long - long_span
# Check all observations in the sliding window within
# long_span of lead_pt.
for other_pt in window.irange_key(west_long, east_long):
if other_pt != lead_pt:
# lead_pt is at the top center of a box 2 * long_span wide by
# 1 * long_span tall. other_pt is is in that box. If desired,
# put additional fine-grained 'closeness' tests here.
# coarse check if any pts within 80% of threshold distance
# then don't need to check distance to any more neighbors
average_lat = (other_pt.lat + lead_pt.lat) / 2
delta_lat = other_pt.lat - lead_pt.lat
delta_long = (other_pt.long - lead_pt.long)/cos(radians(average_lat))
if delta_lat**2 + delta_long**2 <= coarse_threshold:
break
# put vincenty test here
#if 0 < vincenty(lead_pt, other_pt).miles <= close_limit:
# break
else:
data[i] = data[i]._replace(has_close_neighbor=False)
print()
print(time.time() - start)

If you sort the list by latitude (n log(n)), and the points are roughly evenly distributed, it will bring it down to about 1000 points within 5 miles for each point (napkin math, not exact). By only looking at the points that are near in latitude, the runtime goes from n^2 to n*log(n)+.0004n^2. Hopefully this speeds it up enough.

I would give pandas a try. Pandas is made for efficient handling of large amounts of data. That may help with the efficiency of the csv portion anyhow. But from the sounds of it, you've got yourself an inherently inefficient problem to solve. You take point 1 and compare it against 4,999,999 other points. Then you take point 2 and compare it with 4,999,998 other points and so on. Do the math. That's 12.5 trillion comparisons you're doing. If you can do 1,000,000 comparisons per second, that's 144 days of computation. If you can do 10,000,000 comparisons per second, that's 14 days. For just additions in straight python, 10,000,000 operations can take something like 1.1 seconds, but I doubt your comparisons are as fast as an add operation. So give it at least a fortnight or two.
Alternately, you could come up with an alternate algorithm, though I don't have any particular one in mind.

I would redo algorithm in three steps:
Use great-circle distance, and assume 1% error so make limit equal to 1.01*limit.
Code great-circle distance as inlined function, this test should be fast
You'll get some false positives, which you could further test with vincenty

A better solution generated from Oscar Smith. You have a csv file and just sorted it in excel it is very efficient). Then utilize binary search in your program to find the cities within 5 miles(you can make small change to binary search method so it will break if it finds one city satisfying your condition).
Another improvement is to set a map to remember the pair of cities when you find one city is within another one. For example, when you find city A is within 5 miles of city B, use Map to store the pair (B is the key and A is the value). So next time you meet B, search it in the Map first, if it has a corresponding value, you do not need to check it again. But it may use more memory so care about it. Hope it helps you.

This is just a first pass, but I've sped it up by half so far by using great_circle() instead of vincinty(), and cleaning up a couple of other things. The difference is explained here, and the loss in accuracy is about 0.17%:
from geopy.point import Point
from geopy.distance import great_circle
import csv
class CustomGeoPoint(Point):
def __init__(self, latitude, longitude):
super(CustomGeoPoint, self).__init__(latitude, longitude)
self.close_to_another_point = False
def isCloseToAnother(pointA, points):
for pointB in points:
dist = great_circle(pointA, pointB).miles
if 0 < dist <= CLOSE_LIMIT: # (0, close_limit]
return True
return False
with open('geo_input.csv', 'r') as geo_csv:
reader = csv.reader(geo_csv)
next(reader, None) # skip the headers
geo_points = sorted(map(lambda x: CustomGeoPoint(x[0], x[1]), reader))
with open('output.csv', 'w') as output:
writer = csv.writer(output, delimiter=',', quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL)
writer.writerow(['Latitude', 'Longitude', 'CloseToAnotherPoint'])
# for every point, look at every point until one is found within a mile
for point in geo_points:
point.close_to_another_point = isCloseToAnother(point, geo_points)
writer.writerow([point.latitude, point.longitude,
point.close_to_another_point])
I'm going to improve this further.
Before:
$ time python geo.py
real 0m5.765s
user 0m5.675s
sys 0m0.048s
After:
$ time python geo.py
real 0m2.816s
user 0m2.716s
sys 0m0.041s

This problem can be solved with a VP tree. These allows querying data
with distances that are a metric obeying the triangle inequality.
The big advantage of VP trees over a k-D tree is that they can be blindly
applied to geographic data anywhere in the world without having to worry
about projecting it to a suitable 2D space. In addition a true geodesic
distance can be used (no need to worry about the differences between
geodesic distances and distances in the projection).
Here's my test: generate 5 million points randomly and uniformly on the
world. Put these into a VP tree.
Looping over all the points, query the VP tree to find any neighbor a
distance in (0km, 10km] away. (0km is not include in this set to avoid
the query point being found.) Count the number of points with no such
neighbor (which is 229573 in my case).
Cost of setting up the VP tree = 5000000 * 20 distance calculations.
Cost of the queries = 5000000 * 23 distance calculations.
Time for setup and queries is 5m 7s.
I am using C++ with GeographicLib for calculating distances, but
the algorithm can of course be implemented in any language and here's
the python version of GeographicLib.
ADDENDUM: The C++ code implementing this approach is given here.

Iterating over elements, finding minima per each element

First time posting, so I apologize for any confusion.
I have two numpy arrays which are time stamps for a signal.
chan1,chan2 looks like:
911.05, 7.7
1055.6, 455.0
1513.4, 1368.15
4604.6, 3004.4
4970.35, 3344.25
13998.25, 4029.9
15008.7, 6310.15
15757.35, 7309.75
16244.2, 8696.1
16554.65, 9940.0
..., ...
and so on, (up to 65000 elements per chan. pre file)
Edit : The lists are already sorted but the issue is that they are not always equal in spacing. There are gaps that could show up, which would misalign them, so chan1[3] could be closer to chan2[23] instead of, if the spacing was qual chan2[2 or 3 or 4] : End edit
For each elements in chan1, I am interested in finding the closest neighbor in chan2, which is done with:
$ np.min(np.abs(chan2-chan1[i]))
and to keep track of positive or neg. difference:
$ index=np.where( np.abs( chan2-chan1[i]) == res[i])[0][0]
$ if chan2[index]-chan1[i] <0.0 : res[i]=res[i]*(-1.0)
Lastly, I create a histogram of all the differences, in a range I am interested in.
My concern is that I do this in the for loop. I usually try to avoid for loops when I can by utilizing the numpy arrays, as each operation can be performed on the entire array. However, in this case I am unable to find a solution or a build in function (which I understand run significantly faster than anything I can make).
The routine takes about 0.03 seconds per file. There are a few more things happening outside of the function but not a significant number, mostly plotting after everything is done, and a loop to read in files.
I was wondering if anyone has seen a similar problem, or is familiar enough with the python libraries to suggest a solution (maybe a build in function?) to obtain the data I am interested in? I have to go over hundred of thousands of files, and currently my data analysis is about 10 slower than data acquisition. We are also in the middle of upgrading our instruments to where we will be able to obtain data 10-100 times faster, and so the analysis speed is going to become an serious issue.
I would prefer not to use a cluster to brute force the problem, and not too familiar with parallel processing, although I would not mind dabbling in it. It would take me a while to write it in C, and I am not sure if I would be able to make it faster.
Thank you in advance for your help.
def gen_hist(chan1,chan2):
res=np.arange(1,len(chan1)+1,1)*0.0
for i in range(len(chan1)):
res[i]=np.min(np.abs(chan2-chan1[i]))
index=np.where( np.abs( chan2-chan1[i]) == res[i])[0][0]
if chan2[index]-chan1[i] <0.0 : res[i]=res[i]*(-1.0)
return np.histogram(res,bins=np.arange(time_range[0]-interval,\
time_range[-1]+interval,\
interval))[0]
After all the files are cycled through I obtain a plot of the data:
Example of the histogram

Your question is a little vague, but I'm assuming that, given two sorted arrays, you're trying to return an array containing the differences between each element of the first array and the closest value in the second array.
Your algorithm will have a worst case of O(n^2) (np.where() and np.min() are O(n)). I would tackle this by using two iterators instead of one. You store the previous (r_p) and current (r_c) value of the right array and the current (l_c) value of the left array. For each value of the left array, increment the right array until r_c > l_c. Then append min(abs(r_p - l_c), abs(r_c - l_c)) to your result.
In code:
l = [ ... ]
r = [ ... ]
i = 0
j = 0
result = []
r_p = r_c = r[0]
while i < len(l):
l_c = l[i]
while r_c < l and j < len(r):
j += 1
r_c = r[j]
r_p = r[j-1]
result.append(min(abs(r_c - l_c), abs(r_p - l_c)))
i += 1
This runs in O(n). If you need additional speed out of it, try writing it in C or running it in Cython.

Python: sliding window of variable width

I'm writing a program in Python that's processing some data generated during experiments, and it needs to estimate the slope of the data. I've written a piece of code that does this quite nicely, but it's horribly slow (and I'm not very patient). Let me explain how this code works:
1) It grabs a small piece of data of size dx (starting with 3 datapoints)
2) It evaluates whether the difference (i.e. |y(x+dx)-y(x-dx)| ) is larger than a certain minimum value (40x std. dev. of noise)
3) If the difference is large enough, it will calculate the slope using OLS regression. If the difference is too small, it will increase dx and redo the loop with this new dx
4) This continues for all the datapoints
[See updated code further down]
For a datasize of about 100k measurements, this takes about 40 minutes, whereas the rest of the program (it does more processing than just this bit) takes about 10 seconds. I am certain there is a much more efficient way of doing these operations, could you guys please help me out?
Thanks
EDIT:
Ok, so I've got the problem solved by using only binary searches, limiting the number of allowed steps by 200. I thank everyone for their input and I selected the answer that helped me most.
FINAL UPDATED CODE:
def slope(self, data, time):
(wave1, wave2) = wt.dwt(data, "db3")
std = 2*np.std(wave2)
e = std/0.05
de = 5*std
N = len(data)
slopes = np.ones(shape=(N,))
data2 = np.concatenate((-data[::-1]+2*data[0], data, -data[::-1]+2*data[N-1]))
time2 = np.concatenate((-time[::-1]+2*time[0], time, -time[::-1]+2*time[N-1]))
for n in xrange(N+1, 2*N):
left = N+1
right = 2*N
for i in xrange(200):
mid = int(0.5*(left+right))
diff = np.abs(data2[n-mid+N]-data2[n+mid-N])
if diff >= e:
if diff < e + de:
break
right = mid - 1
continue
left = mid + 1
leftlim = n - mid + N
rightlim = n + mid - N
y = data2[leftlim:rightlim:int(0.05*(rightlim-leftlim)+1)]
x = time2[leftlim:rightlim:int(0.05*(rightlim-leftlim)+1)]
xavg = np.average(x)
yavg = np.average(y)
xlen = len(x)
slopes[n-N] = (np.dot(x,y)-xavg*yavg*xlen)/(np.dot(x,x)-xavg*xavg*xlen)
return np.array(slopes)

Your comments suggest that you need to find a better method to estimate ik+1 given ik. No knowledge of values in data would yield to the naive algorithm:
At each iteration for n, leave i at previous value, and see if the abs(data[start]-data[end]) value is less than e. If it is, leave i at its previous value, and find your new one by incrementing it by 1 as you do now. If it is greater, or equal, do a binary search on i to find the appropriate value. You can possibly do a binary search forwards, but finding a good candidate upper limit without knowledge of data can prove to be difficult. This algorithm won't perform worse than your current estimation method.
If you know that data is kind of smooth (no sudden jumps, and hence a smooth plot for all i values) and monotonically increasing, you can replace the binary search with a search backwards by decrementing its value by 1 instead.

How to optimize this will depend on some properties of your data, but here are some ideas:
Have you tried profiling the code? Using one of the Python profilers can give you some useful information about what's taking the most time. Often, a piece of code you've just written will have one biggest bottleneck, and it's not always obvious which piece it is; profiling lets you figure that out and attack the main bottleneck first.
Do you know what typical values of i are? If you have some idea, you can speed things up by starting with i greater than 0 (as #vhallac noted), or by increasing i by larger amounts — if you often see big values for i, increase i by 2 or 3 at a time; if the distribution of is has a long tail, try doubling it each time; etc.
Do you need all the data when doing the least squares regression? If that function call is the bottleneck, you may be able to speed it up by using only some of the data in the range. Suppose, for instance, that at a particular point, you need i to be 200 to see a large enough (above-noise) change in the data. But you may not need all 400 points to get a good estimate of the slope — just using 10 or 20 points, evenly spaced in the start:end range, may be sufficient, and might speed up the code a lot.

I work with Python for similar analyses, and have a few suggestions to make. I didn't look at the details of your code, just to your problem statement:
1) It grabs a small piece of data of size dx (starting with 3
datapoints)
2) It evaluates whether the difference (i.e. |y(x+dx)-y(x-dx)| ) is
larger than a certain minimum value (40x std. dev. of noise)
3) If the difference is large enough, it will calculate the slope
using OLS regression. If the difference is too small, it will increase
dx and redo the loop with this new dx
4) This continues for all the datapoints
I think the more obvious reason for slow execution is the LOOPING nature of your code, when perhaps you could use the VECTORIZED (array-based operations) nature of Numpy.
For step 1, instead of taking pairs of points, you can perform directly `data[3:] - data[-3:] and get all the differences in a single array operation;
For step 2, you can use the result from array-based tests like numpy.argwhere(data > threshold) instead of testing every element inside some loop;
Step 3 sounds conceptually wrong to me. You say that if the difference is too small, it will increase dx. But if the difference is small, the resulting slope would be small because it IS actually small. Then, getting a small value is the right result, and artificially increasing dx to get a "better" result might not be what you want. Well, it might actually be what you want, but you should consider this. I would suggest that you calculate the slope for a fixed dx across the whole data, and then take the resulting array of slopes to select your regions of interest (for example, using data_slope[numpy.argwhere(data_slope > minimum_slope)].
Hope this helps!