autocorrelation computation performance : use of np.correlate
Pierre Haessig <pierre.haessig <at> crans.org>
2012-02-01 18:31:02 GMT
Hi,
[I'm not sure whether this discussion belongs to numpy-discussion or
scipy-dev]
In day to day time series analysis I regularly need to look at the data
autocorrelation ("acorr" or "acf" depending on the software package).
The straighforward available function I have is matplotlib.pyplot.acorr.
However, for a moderately long time series (say of length 10**5) it
taking a huge time just to just dislays the autocorrelation values
within a small range of time lags.
The main reason being it is relying on np.correlate(x,x, mode=2) while
only a few lags are needed.
(I guess mode=2 is an (old fashioned?) way to set mode='full')
I know that np.correlate performance issue has been discussed already,
and there is a *somehow* related ticket
(http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/ticket/1260). I noticed in the ticket's
change number 2 the following comment by Josef : "Maybe a truncated
convolution/correlation would be good". I'll come back to this soon.
I made an example script "acf_timing.py" to start my point with some
timing data :
In Ipython:
>>> run acf_timing.py # it imports statsmodel's acf + define 2 other
acf implementations + an example data 10**5 samples long
%time l,c = mpl_acf(a, 10)
CPU times: user 8.69 s, sys: 0.00 s, total: 8.69 s
Wall time: 11.18 s # pretty long...
%time c = sm_acf(a, 10)
CPU times: user 8.76 s, sys: 0.01 s, total: 8.78 s
Wall time: 10.79 s # long as well. statsmodel has a similar underlying
implementation
#
http://statsmodels.sourceforge.net/generated/scikits.statsmodels.tsa.stattools.acf.html#scikits.statsmodels.tsa.stattools.acf
#Now, better option : use the fft convolution
%time c=sm_acf(a, 10,fft=True)
CPU times: user 0.03 s, sys: 0.01 s, total: 0.04 s
Wall time: 0.07 s
# Fast, but I'm not sure about the memory implication of using fft though.
#The naive option : just compute the acf lags that are needed
%time l,c = naive_acf(a, 10)
CPU times: user 0.01 s, sys: 0.00 s, total: 0.01 s
Wall time: 0.01 s
# Iterative computation. Pretty silly but very fast
# (Now of course, this naive implementation won't scale nicely for a lot
of lags)
Now comes (at last) the question : what should be done about this
performance issue ?
- should there be a truncated np.convolve/np.correlate function, as
Josef suggested ?
- or should people in need of autocorrelation find some workarounds
because this usecase is not big enough to call for a change in np.convolve ?
I really feel this question is about *where* a change should be
implemented (numpy, scipy.signal, maplotlib ?) so that it makes sense
while not breaking 10^10 lines of numpy related code...
Best,
Pierre
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