An "asymmetric" pairwise distance matrix - r

Suppose there are three sequences to be compared: a, b, and c. Traditionally, the resulting 3-by-3 pairwise distance matrix is symmetric, indicating that the distance from a to b is equal to the distance from b to a.
I am wondering if TraMineR provides some way to produce an asymmetric pairwise distance matrix.

No, TraMineR does not produce 'assymetric' dissimilaries precisely for the reasons stressed in Pat's comment.
The main interest of computing pairwise dissimilarities between sequences is that once we have such dissimilarities we can for instance
measure the discrepancy among sequences, determine neighborhoods, find medoids, ...
run cluster algorithms, self-organizing maps, MDS, ...
make ANOVA-like analysis of the sequences
grow regression trees for the sequences
Inputting a non symmetric dissimilarity matrix in those processes would most probably generate irrelevant outcomes.
It is because of this symmetry requirement that the substitution costs used for computing Optimal Matching distances MUST be symmetrical. It is important to not interpret substitution costs as the cost of switching from one state to the other, but to understand them for what they are, i.e., edit costs. When comparing two sequences, for example
aabcc and aadcc, we can make them equal either by replacing arbitrarily b with d in the first one or d with b in the second one. It would then not make sense not giving the same cost for the two substitutions.
Hope this helps.

Related

How can I perform two matrix comparison and statistical testing applying permutations in R?

Im a begginer using R, and Im trying to apply a permutation process (statistical test) for two matrix comparison in order to assess if there is a real relation between spatial association and functional traits of forest tree species.
My first matrix is formed by indices of spatial interactions positive (+) and negative (-) between species. Positive interactions (+) were assigned with the value of 3 and negative interactions (-)
with the value of 1. The second matrix, include the mean euclidean distance of functional traits between species.
Theoretically, what I want to do, is to randomize or permute the trait matrix (incidence matrix) along the spatial matrix, without broken (or better said-retaining) the spatial structure of association among species. One permutation for positive ones (+) and other permutation for negative ones (-).
Can anybody help me to structure a script in R to test this previous relationship?
I just have the two csv species x species matrix files!.

Mathematical representation of a set of points in N dimensional space?

Given some x data points in an N dimensional space, I am trying to find a fixed length representation that could describe any subset s of those x points? For example the mean of the s subset could describe that subset, but it is not unique for that subset only, that is to say, other points in the space could yield the same mean therefore mean is not a unique identifier. Could anyone tell me of a unique measure that could describe the points without being number of points dependent?
In short - it is impossible (as you would achieve infinite noiseless compression). You have to either have varied length representation (or fixed length with length being proportional to maximum number of points) or dealing with "collisions" (as your mapping will not be injective). In the first scenario you simply can store coordinates of each point. In the second one you approximate your point clouds with more and more complex descriptors to balance collisions and memory usage, some posibilities are:
storing mean and covariance (so basically perofming maximum likelihood estimation over Gaussian families)
performing some fixed-complexity density estimation like Gaussian Mixture Model or training a generative Neural Network
use set of simple geometrical/algebraical properties such as:
number of points
mean, max, min, median distance between each pair of points
etc.
Any subset can be identified by a bit mask of length ceiling(lg(x)), where bit i is 1 if the corresponding element belongs to the subset. There is no fixed-length representation that is not a function of x.
EDIT
I was wrong. PCA is a good way to perform dimensionality reduction for this problem, but it won't work for some sets.
However, you can almost do it. Where "almost" is formally defined by the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma, which states that for a given large dimension N, there exists a much lower dimension n, and a linear transformation that maps each point from N to n, while keeping the Euclidean distance between every pair of points of the set within some error ε from the original. Such linear transformation is called the JL Transform.
In other words, your problem is only solvable for sets of points where each pair of points are separated by at least ε. For this case, the JL Transform gives you one possible solution. Moreover, there exists a relationship between N, n and ε (see the lemma), such that, for example, if N=100, the JL Transform can map each point to a point in 5D (n=5), an uniquely identify each subset, if and only if, the minimum distance between any pair of points in the original set is at least ~2.8 (i.e. the points are sufficiently different).
Note that n depends only on N and the minimum distance between any pair of points in the original set. It does not depend on the number of points x, so it is a solution to your problem, albeit some constraints.

substitution matrix based on spatial autocorrelation transformation

I would like to measure the hamming sequence similarity in which the substitution costs are not based on the substitution rates in the observed sequences but based on the spatial autocorrelation within the study area of the different states (states are thus not related to DNA but something else).
I divided my study area in grid cells of equal size (e.g. 1000m) and measured how often the same "state" is observed in a neighboring cell (Rook-case). Consequently the weight matrix indicates that from state A to A (to move within the same states) has a much higher probability than to go from A to B or B to C or A to C. This already indicates that states have a high spatial autocorrelation.
The problem is, if you want to measure sequence similarity the substitution matrix should be 0 at the diagonal. Therefore I was wondering whether there is a kind of transformation to go from an "autocorrelation matrix" to a substitution matrix, with 0 values along the diagonal. By means of this we would like to account for spatial autocorrelation in the study area in our sequence similarity measure. To do my analysis I am using the package TraMineR.
Example matrix in R for sequences consisting out of four states (A,B,C,D):
Sequence example: AAAAAABBBBCCCCCCCCCCCCDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDAAAAAAAAA
Autocorrelation matrix:
A = c(17.50,3.00,1.00,0.05)
B = c(3.00,10.00,2.00,1.00)
C = c(1.00,2.00,30.00,3.00)
D = c(0.05,1.00,3.00,20.00)
subm = rbind(A,B,C,D)
colnames(subm) = c("A","B","C","D")
how to transform this matrix to a substitution matrix?
First, TraMineR computes the Hamming distance, i.e., a dissimilarity, not a similarity.
The simple Hamming distance is just the count of mismatches between two sequences. For example, the Hamming distance between AABBCC and ABBBAC is 2, and between AAAAAA and AAAAAA it is 0 since there are no mismatches.
Generalized Hamming allows to weighting mismatches (not matches!) with substitution costs. For example if the substitution cost between A and B is 1.5, and is 2 between B and C, then the distance would be the weighted sum of mismatches, i.e., 3.5 between the first two sequences. It would still be zero between one sequence and itself.
From what I understand, the shown matrix is not the matrix of substitution costs. It is the matrix of what you call 'spatial autocorrelations', and you look for how you can turn this information into substitutions costs.
The idea is to assign high substitution cost (mismatch weight) when the autocorrelation (a rate in your case) is low, i.e., when there is a low probability to find say state B in the neighborhood of state A, and to assign a low substitution cost when the probability is high. Since your probability matrix is symmetric, a simple solution is to use $1 - p(A|B)$ for all off diagonal terms, and leave 0 on the diagonal for the reason explained above.
sm <- 1 - subm/100
diag(sm) <- 0
sm
For non symmetric probabilities, you could use a similar formula to the one used for deriving the costs from transition rates, i.e., $2 - p(A|B) - p(B|A)$.

Determining optimum number of clusters for k-means with a large dataset

I have a matrix of 62 columns and 181408 rows that I am going to be clustering using k-means. What I would ideally like is a method of identifying what the optimum number of clusters should be. I have tried implementing the gap statistic technique using clusGap from the cluster package (reproducible code below), but this produces several error messages relating to the size of the vector (122 GB) and memory.limitproblems in Windows and a "Error in dist(xs) : negative length vectors are not allowed" in OS X. Does anyone has any suggestions on techniques that will work in determining optimum number of clusters with a large dataset? Or, alternatively, how to make my code function (and does not take several days to complete)? Thanks.
library(cluster)
inputdata<-matrix(rexp(11247296, rate=.1), ncol=62)
clustergap <- clusGap(inputdata, FUN=kmeans, K.max=12, B=10)
At 62 dimensions, the result will likely be meaningless due to the curse of dimensionality.
k-means does a minimum SSQ assignment, which technically equals minimizing the squared Euclidean distances. However, Euclidean distance is known to not work well for high dimensional data.
If you don't know the numbers of the clusters k to provide as parameter to k-means so there are three ways to find it automaticaly:
G-means algortithm: it discovers the number of clusters automatically using a statistical test to decide whether to split a k-means center into two. This algorithm takes a hierarchical approach to detect the number of clusters, based on a statistical test for the hypothesis that a subset of data follows a Gaussian distribution (continuous function which approximates the exact binomial distribution of events), and if not it splits the cluster. It starts with a small number of centers, say one cluster only (k=1), then the algorithm splits it into two centers (k=2) and splits each of these two centers again (k=4), having four centers in total. If G-means does not accept these four centers then the answer is the previous step: two centers in this case (k=2). This is the number of clusters your dataset will be divided into. G-means is very useful when you do not have an estimation of the number of clusters you will get after grouping your instances. Notice that an inconvenient choice for the "k" parameter might give you wrong results. The parallel version of g-means is called p-means. G-means sources:
source 1
source 2
source 3
x-means: a new algorithm that efficiently, searches the space of cluster locations and number of clusters to optimize the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) or the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) measure. This version of k-means finds the number k and also accelerates k-means.
Online k-means or Streaming k-means: it permits to execute k-means by scanning the whole data once and it finds automaticaly the optimal number of k. Spark implements it.
This is from RBloggers.
https://www.r-bloggers.com/k-means-clustering-from-r-in-action/
You could do the following:
data(wine, package="rattle")
head(wine)
df <- scale(wine[-1])
wssplot <- function(data, nc=15, seed=1234){
wss <- (nrow(data)-1)*sum(apply(data,2,var))
for (i in 2:nc){
set.seed(seed)
wss[i] <- sum(kmeans(data, centers=i)$withinss)}
plot(1:nc, wss, type="b", xlab="Number of Clusters",
ylab="Within groups sum of squares")}
wssplot(df)
this will create a plot like this.
From this you can choose the value of k to be either 3 or 4. i.e
there is a clear fall in 'within groups sum of squares' when moving from 1 to 3 clusters. After three clusters, this decrease drops off, suggesting that a 3-cluster solution may be a good fit to the data.
But like Anony-Mouse pointed out, the curse of dimensionality affects due to the fact that euclidean distance being used in k means.
I hope this answer helps you to a certain extent.

how to generate pseudo-random positive definite matrix with constraints on the off-diagonal elements? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Closed 11 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
how to generate pseudo-random positive definite matrix with constraints on the off-diagonal elements?
The user wants to impose a unique, non-trivial, upper/lower bound on the correlation between every pair of variable in a var/covar matrix.
For example: I want a variance matrix in which all variables have 0.9 > |rho(x_i,x_j)| > 0.6, rho(x_i,x_j) being the correlation between variables x_i and x_j.
Thanks.
There are MANY issues here.
First of all, are the pseudo-random deviates assumed to be normally distributed? I'll assume they are, as any discussion of correlation matrices gets nasty if we diverge into non-normal distributions.
Next, it is rather simple to generate pseudo-random normal deviates, given a covariance matrix. Generate standard normal (independent) deviates, and then transform by multiplying by the Cholesky factor of the covariance matrix. Add in the mean at the end if the mean was not zero.
And, a covariance matrix is also rather simple to generate given a correlation matrix. Just pre and post multiply the correlation matrix by a diagonal matrix composed of the standard deviations. This scales a correlation matrix into a covariance matrix.
I'm still not sure where the problem lies in this question, since it would seem easy enough to generate a "random" correlation matrix, with elements uniformly distributed in the desired range.
So all of the above is rather trivial by any reasonable standards, and there are many tools out there to generate pseudo-random normal deviates given the above information.
Perhaps the issue is the user insists that the resulting random matrix of deviates must have correlations in the specified range. You must recognize that a set of random numbers will only have the desired distribution parameters in an asymptotic sense. Thus, as the sample size goes to infinity, you should expect to see the specified distribution parameters. But any small sample set will not necessarily have the desired parameters, in the desired ranges.
For example, (in MATLAB) here is a simple positive definite 3x3 matrix. As such, it makes a very nice covariance matrix.
S = randn(3);
S = S'*S
S =
0.78863 0.01123 -0.27879
0.01123 4.9316 3.5732
-0.27879 3.5732 2.7872
I'll convert S into a correlation matrix.
s = sqrt(diag(S));
C = diag(1./s)*S*diag(1./s)
C =
1 0.0056945 -0.18804
0.0056945 1 0.96377
-0.18804 0.96377 1
Now, I can sample from a normal distribution using the statistics toolbox (mvnrnd should do the trick.) As easy is to use a Cholesky factor.
L = chol(S)
L =
0.88805 0.012646 -0.31394
0 2.2207 1.6108
0 0 0.30643
Now, generate pseudo-random deviates, then transform them as desired.
X = randn(20,3)*L;
cov(X)
ans =
0.79069 -0.14297 -0.45032
-0.14297 6.0607 4.5459
-0.45032 4.5459 3.6549
corr(X)
ans =
1 -0.06531 -0.2649
-0.06531 1 0.96587
-0.2649 0.96587 1
If your desire was that the correlations must ALWAYS be greater than -0.188, then this sampling technique has failed, since the numbers are pseudo-random. In fact, that goal will be a difficult one to achieve unless your sample size is large enough.
You might employ a simple rejection scheme, whereby you do the sampling, then redo it repeatedly until the sample has the desired properties, with the correlations in the desired ranges. This may get tiring.
An approach that might work (but one that I've not totally thought out at this point) is to use the standard scheme as above to generate a random sample. Compute the correlations. I they fail to lie in the proper ranges, then identify the perturbation one would need to make to the actual (measured) covariance matrix of your data, so that the correlations would be as desired. Now, find a zero mean random perturbation to your sampled data that would move the sample covariance matrix in the desired direction.
This might work, but unless I knew that this is actually the question at hand, I won't bother to go any more deeply into it. (Edit: I've thought some more about this problem, and it appears to be a quadratic programming problem, with quadratic constraints, to find the smallest perturbation to a matrix X, such that the resulting covariance (or correlation) matrix has the desired properties.)
This is not a complete answer, but a suggestion of a possible constructive method:
Looking at the characterizations of the positive definite matrices (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive-definite_matrix) I think one of the most affordable approaches could be using the Sylvester criterion.
You can start with a trivial 1x1 random matrix with positive determinant and expand it in one row and column step by step while ensuring that the new matrix has also a positive determinant (how to achieve that is up to you ^_^).
Woodship,
"First of all, are the pseudo-random deviates assumed to be normally distributed?"
yes.
"Perhaps the issue is the user insists that the resulting random matrix of deviates must have correlations in the specified range."
Yes, that's the whole difficulty
"You must recognize that a set of random numbers will only have the desired distribution parameters in an asymptotic sense."
True, but this is not the problem here: your strategy works for p=2, but fails for p>2, regardless of sample size.
"If your desire was that the correlations must ALWAYS be greater than -0.188, then this sampling technique has failed, since the numbers are pseudo-random. In fact, that goal will be a difficult one to achieve unless your sample size is large enough."
It is not a sample size issue b/c with p>2 you do not even observe convergence to the right range for the correlations, as sample size growths: i tried the technique you suggest before posting here, it obviously is flawed.
"You might employ a simple rejection scheme, whereby you do the sampling, then redo it repeatedly until the sample has the desired properties, with the correlations in the desired ranges. This may get tiring."
Not an option, for p large (say larger than 10) this option is intractable.
"Compute the correlations. I they fail to lie in the proper ranges, then identify the perturbation one would need to make to the actual (measured) covariance matrix of your data, so that the correlations would be as desired."
Ditto
As for the QP, i understand the constraints, but i'm not sure about the way you define the objective function; by using the "smallest perturbation" off some initial matrix, you will always end up getting the same (solution) matrix: all the off diagonal entries will be exactly equal to either one of the two bounds (e.g. not pseudo random); plus it is kind of an overkill isn't it ?
Come on people, there must be something simpler

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