Generating arrays of random numbers without loop in MATLAB - performance

I have a loop which generates random samples from the chi-square distribution with different degrees of freedom (df1, df2, df3, df4) and saves it to a cell array:
for k=1:N
x{k} = chi2rnd([df1 df2 df3 df4]);
end
Is there any way to do this without any iterations? I tried to use cellfun, but it didn't work.

Here is a vectorized way (method 1):
x = num2cell(chi2rnd(repmat([df1 df2 df3 df4], N, 1), N, 4), 2);
You may also try this method (method 2):
df = [df1 df2 df3 df4];
y = zeros(N,numel(df));
for k = 1:numel(df)
y(:,k) = chi2rnd(df(k),N,1);
end
x = num2cell (y,2);
Result of timing for N = 10000 in Octave. However you need to measure the time in MATLAB:
Original solution : 3.91095 seconds
Vectorized solution (method 1): 0.0691321 seconds
Loop solution (method 2) : 0.0124869 seconds

Related

Efficiency of diag() - MATLAB

Motivation:
In writing out a matrix operation that was to be performed over tens of thousands of vectors I kept coming across the warning:
Requested 200000x200000 (298.0GB) array exceeds maximum array size
preference. Creation of arrays greater than this limit may take a long
time and cause MATLAB to become unresponsive. See array size limit or
preference panel for more information.
The reason for this was my use of diag() to get the values down the diagonal of an matrix inner product. Because MATLAB is generally optimized for vector/matrix operations, when I first write code, I usually go for the vectorized form. In this case, however, MATLAB has to build the entire matrix in order to get the diagonal which causes the memory and speed issues.
Experiment:
I decided to test the use of diag() vs a for loop to see if at any point it was more efficient to use diag():
num = 200000; % Matrix dimension
x = ones(num, 1);
y = 2 * ones(num, 1);
% z = diag(x*y'); % Expression to solve
% Loop approach
tic
z = zeros(num,1);
for i = 1 : num
z(i) = x(i)*y(i);
end
toc
% Dividing the too-large matrix into process-able chunks
fraction = [10, 20, 50, 100, 500, 1000, 5000, 10000, 20000];
time = zeros(size(fraction));
for k = 1 : length(fraction)
f = fraction(k);
% Operation to time
tic
z = zeros(num,1);
for i = 1 : k
first = (i-1) * (num / f);
last = first + (num / f);
z(first + 1 : last) = diag(x(first + 1: last) * y(first + 1 : last)');
end
time(k) = toc;
end
% Plot results
figure;
hold on
plot(log10(fraction), log10(chunkTime));
plot(log10(fraction), repmat(log10(loopTime), 1, length(fraction)));
plot(log10(fraction), log10(chunkTime), 'g*'); % Plot points along time
legend('Partioned Running Time', 'Loop Running Time');
xlabel('Log_{10}(Fractional Size)'), ylabel('Log_{10}(Running Time)'), title('Running Time Comparison');
This is the result of the test:
(NOTE: The red line represents the loop time as a threshold--it's not to say that the total loop time is constant regardless of the number of loops)
From the graph it is clear that it takes breaking the operations down into roughly 200x200 square matrices to be faster to use diag than to perform the same operation using loops.
Question:
Can someone explain why I'm seeing these results? Also, I would think that with MATLAB's ever-more optimized design, there would be built-in handling of these massive matrices within a diag() function call. For example, it could just perform the i = j indexed operations. Is there a particular reason why this might be prohibitive?
I also haven't really thought of memory implications for diag using the partition method, although it's clear that as the partition size decreases, memory requirements drop.
Test of speed of diag vs. a loop.
Initialization:
n = 10000;
M = randn(n, n); %create a random matrix.
Test speed of diag:
tic;
d = diag(M);
toc;
Test speed of loop:
tic;
d = zeros(n, 1);
for i=1:n
d(i) = M(i,i);
end;
toc;
This would test diag. Your code is not a clean test of diag...
Comment on where there might be confusion
Diag only extracts the diagonal of a matrix. If x and y are vectors, and you do d = diag(x * y'), MATLAB first constructs the n by n matrix x*y' and calls diag on that. This is why, you get the error, "cannot construct 290GB matrix..." Matlab interpreter does not optimize in a crazy way, realize you only want the diagonal and construct just a vector (rather than full matrix with x*y', that does not happen.
Not sure if you're asking this, but the fastest way to calculate d = diag(x*y') where x and y are n by 1 vectors would simply be: d = x.*y

Reshape vector to matrix with column-wise zero padding in matlab

for an input matrix
in = [1 1;
1 2;
1 3;
1 4;
2 5;
2 6;
2 7;
3 8;
3 9;
3 10;
3 11];
i want to get the output matrix
out = [1 5 8;
2 6 9;
3 7 10;
4 0 11];
meaning i want to reshape the second input column into an output matrix, where all values corresponding to one value in the first input column are written into one column of the output matrix.
As there can be different numbers of entries for each value in the first input column (here 4 values for "1" and "3", but only 3 for "2"), the normal reshape function is not applicable. I need to pad all columns to the maximum number of rows.
Do you have an idea how to do this matlab-ish?
The second input column can only contain positive numbers, so the padding values can be 0, -x, NaN, ...
The best i could come up with is this (loop-based):
maxNumElem = 0;
for i=in(1,1):in(end,1)
maxNumElem = max(maxNumElem,numel(find(in(:,1)==i)));
end
out = zeros(maxNumElem,in(end,1)-in(1,1));
for i=in(1,1):in(end,1)
tmp = in(in(:,1)==i,2);
out(1:length(tmp),i) = tmp;
end
Either of the following approaches assumes that column 1 of in is sorted, as in the example. If that's not the case, apply this initially to sort in according to that criterion:
in = sortrows(in,1);
Approach 1 (using accumarray)
Compute the required number of rows, using mode;
Use accumarray to gather the values corresponding to each column, filled with zeros at the end. The result is a cell;
Concatenate horizontally the contents of all cells.
Code:
[~, n] = mode(in(:,1)); %//step 1
out = accumarray(in(:,1), in(:,2), [], #(x){[x; zeros(n-numel(x),1)]}); %//step 2
out = [out{:}]; %//step 3
Alternatively, step 1 could be done with histc
n = max(histc(in(:,1), unique(in(:,1)))); %//step 1
or with accumarray:
n = max(accumarray(in(:,1), in(:,2), [], #(x) numel(x))); %//step 1
Approach 2 (using sparse)
Generate a row-index vector using this answer by #Dan, and then build your matrix with sparse:
a = arrayfun(#(x)(1:x), diff(find([1,diff(in(:,1).'),1])), 'uni', 0); %//'
out = full(sparse([a{:}], in(:,1), in(:,2)));
Introduction to proposed solution and Code
Proposed here is a bsxfun based masking approach that uses the binary operators available as builtins for use with bsxfun and as such I would consider this very appropriate for problems like this. Of course, you must also be aware that bsxfun is a memory hungry tool. So, it could pose a threat if you are dealing with maybe billions of elements depending also on the memory available for MATLAB's usage.
Getting into the details of the proposed approach, we get the counts of each ID from column-1 of the input with histc. Then, the magic happens with bsxfun + #le to create a mask of positions in the output array (initialized by zeros) that are to be filled by the column-2 elements from input. That's all you need to tackle the problem with this approach.
Solution Code
counts = histc(in(:,1),1:max(in(:,1)))'; %//' counts of each ID from column1
max_counts = max(counts); %// Maximum counts for each ID
mask = bsxfun(#le,[1:max_counts]',counts); %//'# mask of locations where
%// column2 elements are to be placed
out = zeros(max_counts,numel(counts)); %// Initialize the output array
out(mask) = in(:,2); %// place the column2 elements in the output array
Benchmarking (for performance)
The benchmarking presented here compares the proposed solution in this post against the various methods presented in Luis's solution. This skips the original loopy approach presented in the problem as it appeared to be very slow for the input generated in the benchmarking code.
Benchmarking Code
num_ids = 5000;
counts_each_id = randi([10 100],num_ids,1);
num_runs = 20; %// number of iterations each approach is run for
%// Generate random input array
in = [];
for k = 1:num_ids
in = [in ; [repmat(k,counts_each_id(k),1) rand(counts_each_id(k),1)]];
end
%// Warm up tic/toc.
for k = 1:50000
tic(); elapsed = toc();
end
disp('------------- With HISTC + BSXFUN Masking approach')
tic
for iter = 1:num_runs
counts = histc(in(:,1),1:max(in(:,1)))';
max_counts = max(counts);
out = zeros(max_counts,numel(counts));
out(bsxfun(#le,[1:max_counts]',counts)) = in(:,2);
end
toc
clear counts max_counts out
disp('------------- With MODE + ACCUMARRAY approach')
tic
for iter = 1:num_runs
[~, n] = mode(in(:,1)); %//step 1
out = accumarray(in(:,1), in(:,2), [], #(x){[x; zeros(n-numel(x),1)]}); %//step 2
out = [out{:}];
end
toc
clear n out
disp('------------- With HISTC + ACCUMARRAY approach')
tic
for iter = 1:num_runs
n = max(histc(in(:,1), unique(in(:,1))));
out = accumarray(in(:,1), in(:,2), [], #(x){[x; zeros(n-numel(x),1)]}); %//step 2
out = [out{:}];
end
toc
clear n out
disp('------------- With ARRAYFUN + Sparse approach')
tic
for iter = 1:num_runs
a = arrayfun(#(x)(1:x), diff(find([1,diff(in(:,1).'),1])), 'uni', 0); %//'
out = full(sparse([a{:}], in(:,1), in(:,2)));
end
toc
clear a out
Results
------------- With HISTC + BSXFUN Masking approach
Elapsed time is 0.598359 seconds.
------------- With MODE + ACCUMARRAY approach
Elapsed time is 2.452778 seconds.
------------- With HISTC + ACCUMARRAY approach
Elapsed time is 2.579482 seconds.
------------- With ARRAYFUN + Sparse approach
Elapsed time is 1.455362 seconds.
slightly better, but still uses a loop :(
out=zeros(4,3);%set to zero matrix
for i = 1:max(in(:,1)); %find max in column 1, and loop for that number
ind = find(in(:,1)==i); %
out(1: size(in(ind,2),1),i)= in(ind,2);
end
don't know if you can avoid the loop...

Compute double sum in matlab efficiently?

I am looking for an optimal way to program this summation ratio. As input I have two vectors v_mn and x_mn with (M*N)x1 elements each.
The ratio is of the form:
The vector x_mn is 0-1 vector so when x_mn=1, the ration is r given above and when x_mn=0 the ratio is 0.
The vector v_mn is a vector which contain real numbers.
I did the denominator like this but it takes a lot of times.
function r_ij = denominator(v_mn, M, N, i, j)
%here x_ij=1, to get r_ij.
S = [];
for m = 1:M
for n = 1:N
if (m ~= i)
if (n ~= j)
S = [S v_mn(i, n)];
else
S = [S 0];
end
else
S = [S 0];
end
end
end
r_ij = 1+S;
end
Can you give a good way to do it in matlab. You can ignore the ratio and give me the denominator which is more complicated.
EDIT: I am sorry I did not write it very good. The i and j are some numbers between 1..M and 1..N respectively. As you can see, the ratio r is many values (M*N values). So I calculated only the value i and j. More precisely, I supposed x_ij=1. Also, I convert the vectors v_mn into a matrix that's why I use double index.
If you reshape your data, your summation is just a repeated matrix/vector multiplication.
Here's an implementation for a single m and n, along with a simple speed/equality test:
clc
%# some arbitrary test parameters
M = 250;
N = 1000;
v = rand(M,N); %# (you call it v_mn)
x = rand(M,N); %# (you call it x_mn)
m0 = randi(M,1); %# m of interest
n0 = randi(N,1); %# n of interest
%# "Naive" version
tic
S1 = 0;
for mm = 1:M %# (you call this m')
if mm == m0, continue; end
for nn = 1:N %# (you call this n')
if nn == n0, continue; end
S1 = S1 + v(m0,nn) * x(mm,nn);
end
end
r1 = v(m0,n0)*x(m0,n0) / (1+S1);
toc
%# MATLAB version: use matrix multiplication!
tic
ninds = [1:m0-1 m0+1:M];
minds = [1:n0-1 n0+1:N];
S2 = sum( x(minds, ninds) * v(m0, ninds).' );
r2 = v(m0,n0)*x(m0,n0) / (1+S2);
toc
%# Test if values are equal
abs(r1-r2) < 1e-12
Outputs on my machine:
Elapsed time is 0.327004 seconds. %# loop-version
Elapsed time is 0.002455 seconds. %# version with matrix multiplication
ans =
1 %# and yes, both are equal
So the speedup is ~133×
Now that's for a single value of m and n. To do this for all values of m and n, you can use an (optimized) double loop around it:
r = zeros(M,N);
for m0 = 1:M
xx = x([1:m0-1 m0+1:M], :);
vv = v(m0,:).';
for n0 = 1:N
ninds = [1:n0-1 n0+1:N];
denom = 1 + sum( xx(:,ninds) * vv(ninds) );
r(m0,n0) = v(m0,n0)*x(m0,n0)/denom;
end
end
which completes in ~15 seconds on my PC for M = 250, N= 1000 (R2010a).
EDIT: actually, with a little more thought, I was able to reduce it all down to this:
denom = zeros(M,N);
for mm = 1:M
xx = x([1:mm-1 mm+1:M],:);
denom(mm,:) = sum( xx*v(mm,:).' ) - sum( bsxfun(#times, xx, v(mm,:)) );
end
denom = denom + 1;
r_mn = x.*v./denom;
which completes in less than 1 second for N = 250 and M = 1000 :)
For a start you need to pre-alocate your S matrix. It changes size every loop so put
S = zeros(m*n, 1)
at the start of your function. This will also allow you to do away with your else conditional statements, ie they will reduce to this:
if (m ~= i)
if (n ~= j)
S(m*M + n) = v_mn(i, n);
Otherwise since you have to visit every element im afraid it may not be able to get much faster.
If you desperately need more speed you can look into doing some mex coding which is code in c/c++ but run in matlab.
http://www.mathworks.com.au/help/matlab/matlab_external/introducing-mex-files.html
Rather than first jumping into vectorization of the double loop, you may want modify the above to make sure that it does what you want. In this code, there is no summing of the data, instead a vector S is being resized at each iteration. As well, the signature could include the matrices V and X so that the multiplication occurs as in the formula (rather than just relying on the value of X to be zero or one, let us pass that matrix in).
The function could look more like the following (I've replaced the i,j inputs with m,n to be more like the equation):
function result = denominator(V,X,m,n)
% use the size of V to determine M and N
[M,N] = size(V);
% initialize the summed value to one (to account for one at the end)
result = 1;
% outer loop
for i=1:M
% ignore the case where m==i
if i~=m
for j=1:N
% ignore the case where n==j
if j~=n
result = result + V(m,j)*X(i,j);
end
end
end
end
Note how the first if is outside of the inner for loop since it does not depend on j. Try the above and see what happens!
You can vectorize from within Matlab to speed up your calculations. Every time you use an operation like ".^" or ".*" or any matrix operation for that matter, Matlab will do them in parallel, which is much, much faster than iterating over each item.
In this case, look at what you are doing in terms of matrices. First, in your loop you are only dealing with the mth row of $V_{nm}$, which we can use as a vector for itself.
If you look at your formula carefully, you can figure out that you almost get there if you just write this row vector as a column vector and multiply the matrix $X_{nm}$ to it from the left, using standard matrix multiplication. The resulting vector contains the sums over all n. To get the final result, just sum up this vector.
function result = denominator_vectorized(V,X,m,n)
% get the part of V with the first index m
Vm = V(m,:)';
% remove the parts of X you don't want to iterate over. Note that, since I
% am inside the function, I am only editing the value of X within the scope
% of this function.
X(m,:) = 0;
X(:,n) = 0;
%do the matrix multiplication and the summation at once
result = 1-sum(X*Vm);
To show you how this optimizes your operation, I will compare it to the code proposed by another commenter:
function result = denominator(V,X,m,n)
% use the size of V to determine M and N
[M,N] = size(V);
% initialize the summed value to one (to account for one at the end)
result = 1;
% outer loop
for i=1:M
% ignore the case where m==i
if i~=m
for j=1:N
% ignore the case where n==j
if j~=n
result = result + V(m,j)*X(i,j);
end
end
end
end
The test:
V=rand(10000,10000);
X=rand(10000,10000);
disp('looped version')
tic
denominator(V,X,1,1)
toc
disp('matrix operation')
tic
denominator_vectorized(V,X,1,1)
toc
The result:
looped version
ans =
2.5197e+07
Elapsed time is 4.648021 seconds.
matrix operation
ans =
2.5197e+07
Elapsed time is 0.563072 seconds.
That is almost ten times the speed of the loop iteration. So, always look out for possible matrix operations in your code. If you have the Parallel Computing Toolbox installed and a CUDA-enabled graphics card installed, Matlab will even perform these operations on your graphics card without any further effort on your part!
EDIT: That last bit is not entirely true. You still need to take a few steps to do operations on CUDA hardware, but they aren't a lot. See Matlab documentation.

Fastest way to find rows without NaNs in Matlab

I would like to find the indexes of rows without any NaN in the fastest way possible since I need to do it thousands of times. So far I have tried the following two approaches:
find(~isnan(sum(data, 2)));
find(all(~isnan(data), 2));
Is there a clever way to speed this up or is this the best possible? The dimension of the data matrix is usually thousands by hundreds.
Edit:
matrix multiplication can be faster than sum, so the operation is almost twice faster for matrices above 500 x500 elements (in my Matlab 2012a machine). So my solution is:
find(~isnan(data*zeros(size(data,2),1)))
Out of the two methods you suggested (denoted f and g) in the question the first is faster (using timeit):
data=rand(4000);
nani=randi(numel(data),1,500);
data(nani)=NaN;
f= #() find(~isnan(sum(data, 2)));
g= #() find(all(~isnan(data), 2));
h= #() find(~isnan(data*zeros(size(data,2),1)));
timeit(f)
ans =
0.0263
timeit(g)
ans =
0.1489
timeit(h)
ans =
0.0146
If the nan density is high enough, then a double loop will be the fastest method. This is because the search of a row can be discarded as soon as the first nan is found. For example, consider the following speed test:
%# Preallocate some parameters
T = 5000; %# Number of rows
N = 500; %# Number of columns
X = randi(5, T, N); %# Sample data matrix
M = 100; %# Number of simulation iterations
X(X == 1) = nan; %# Randomly set some elements of X to nan
%# Your first method
tic
for m = 1:M
Soln1 = find(~isnan(sum(X, 2)));
end
toc
%# Your second method
tic
for m = 1:M
Soln2 = find(all(~isnan(X), 2));
end
toc
%# A double loop
tic
for m = 1:M
Soln3 = ones(T, 1);
for t = 1:T
for n = 1:N
if isnan(X(t, n))
Soln3(t) = 0;
break
end
end
end
Soln3 = find(Soln3);
end
toc
The results are:
Elapsed time is 0.164880 seconds.
Elapsed time is 0.218950 seconds.
Elapsed time is 0.068168 seconds. %# The double loop method
Of course, the nan density is so high in this simulation that none of the rows are nan free. But you never said anything about the nan density of your matrix, so I figured I'd post this answer for general consumption and contemplation :-)
Can you tell more about what you want to do with the indices
time = cputime;
A = rand(1000,100); % Some matrix data
for i = 1:100
A(randi(20,1,100)) = NaN; % Randomly assigned NaN
B = isnan(A); % B has 0 and 1
C = A(B == 0); % C has all ~NaN elements
ind(i,:) = find(B == 1); % ind has all NaN indices
end
disp(cputime-time)
for 100 times in a loop, 0.1404 sec
any() is faster than all() or sum().
try:
idx = find(~any(isnan(data), 2));
correction: it seems that sum() approach is faster:
idx = find(~isnan(sum(data, 2)));

Summation without a for loop - MATLAB

I have 2 matrices: V which is square MxM, and K which is MxN. Calling the dimension across rows x and the dimension across columns t, I need to evaluate the integral (i.e sum) over both dimensions of K times a t-shifted version of V, the answer being a function of the shift (almost like a convolution, see below). The sum is defined by the following expression, where _{} denotes the summation indices, and a zero-padding of out-of-limits elements is assumed:
S(t) = sum_{x,tau}[V(x,t+tau) * K(x,tau)]
I manage to do it with a single loop, over the t dimension (vectorizing the x dimension):
% some toy matrices
V = rand(50,50);
K = rand(50,10);
[M N] = size(K);
S = zeros(1, M);
for t = 1 : N
S(1,1:end-t+1) = S(1,1:end-t+1) + sum(bsxfun(#times, V(:,t:end), K(:,t)),1);
end
I have similar expressions which I managed to evaluate without a for loop, using a combination of conv2 and\or mirroring (flipping) of a single dimension. However I can't see how to avoid a for loop in this case (despite the appeared similarity to convolution).
Steps to vectorization
1] Perform sum(bsxfun(#times, V(:,t:end), K(:,t)),1) for all columns in V against all columns in K with matrix-multiplication -
sum_mults = V.'*K
This would give us a 2D array with each column representing sum(bsxfun(#times,.. operation at each iteration.
2] Step1 gave us all possible summations and also the values to be summed are not aligned in the same row across iterations, so we need to do a bit more work before summing along rows. The rest of the work is about getting a shifted up version. For the same, you can use boolean indexing with a upper and lower triangular boolean mask. Finally, we sum along each row for the final output. So, this part of the code would look like so -
valid_mask = tril(true(size(sum_mults)));
sum_mults_shifted = zeros(size(sum_mults));
sum_mults_shifted(flipud(valid_mask)) = sum_mults(valid_mask);
out = sum(sum_mults_shifted,2);
Runtime tests -
%// Inputs
V = rand(1000,1000);
K = rand(1000,200);
disp('--------------------- With original loopy approach')
tic
[M N] = size(K);
S = zeros(1, M);
for t = 1 : N
S(1,1:end-t+1) = S(1,1:end-t+1) + sum(bsxfun(#times, V(:,t:end), K(:,t)),1);
end
toc
disp('--------------------- With proposed vectorized approach')
tic
sum_mults = V.'*K; %//'
valid_mask = tril(true(size(sum_mults)));
sum_mults_shifted = zeros(size(sum_mults));
sum_mults_shifted(flipud(valid_mask)) = sum_mults(valid_mask);
out = sum(sum_mults_shifted,2);
toc
Output -
--------------------- With original loopy approach
Elapsed time is 2.696773 seconds.
--------------------- With proposed vectorized approach
Elapsed time is 0.044144 seconds.
This might be cheating (using arrayfun instead of a for loop) but I believe this expression gives you what you want:
S = arrayfun(#(t) sum(sum( V(:,(t+1):(t+N)) .* K )), 1:(M-N), 'UniformOutput', true)

Resources