Finding local maxima and minima

Question

I\'m looking for a computationally efficient way to find local maxima/minima for a large list of numbers in R. Hopefully without for loops...

For exampl

Answer 1

In the case I'm working on, duplicates are frequent. So I have implemented a function that allows finding first or last extrema (min or max):

locate_xtrem <- function (x, last = FALSE)
{
  # use rle to deal with duplicates
  x_rle <- rle(x)

  # force the first value to be identified as an extrema
  first_value <- x_rle$values[1] - x_rle$values[2]

  # differentiate the series, keep only the sign, and use 'rle' function to
  # locate increase or decrease concerning multiple successive values.
  # The result values is a series of (only) -1 and 1.
  #
  # ! NOTE: with this method, last value will be considered as an extrema
  diff_sign_rle <- c(first_value, diff(x_rle$values)) %>% sign() %>% rle()

  # this vector will be used to get the initial positions
  diff_idx <- cumsum(diff_sign_rle$lengths)

  # find min and max
  diff_min <- diff_idx[diff_sign_rle$values < 0]
  diff_max <- diff_idx[diff_sign_rle$values > 0]

  # get the min and max indexes in the original series
  x_idx <- cumsum(x_rle$lengths)
  if (last) {
    min <- x_idx[diff_min]
    max <- x_idx[diff_max]
  } else {
    min <- x_idx[diff_min] - x_rle$lengths[diff_min] + 1
    max <- x_idx[diff_max] - x_rle$lengths[diff_max] + 1
  }
  # just get number of occurences
  min_nb <- x_rle$lengths[diff_min]
  max_nb <- x_rle$lengths[diff_max]

  # format the result as a tibble
  bind_rows(
    tibble(Idx = min, Values = x[min], NB = min_nb, Status = "min"),
    tibble(Idx = max, Values = x[max], NB = max_nb, Status = "max")) %>%
    arrange(.data$Idx) %>%
    mutate(Last = last) %>%
    mutate_at(vars(.data$Idx, .data$NB), as.integer)
}

The answer to the original question is:

> x <- c(1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1)
> locate_xtrem(x)
# A tibble: 5 x 5
    Idx Values    NB Status Last 
        
1     1      1     1 min    FALSE
2     3      3     1 max    FALSE
3     5      1     2 min    FALSE
4     7      2     1 max    FALSE
5     8      1     1 min    FALSE

The result indicates that the second minimum is equal to 1 and that this value is repeated twice starting at index 5. Therefore, a different result could be obtained by indicating this time to the function to find the last occurrences of local extremas:

> locate_xtrem(x, last = TRUE)
# A tibble: 5 x 5
    Idx Values    NB Status Last 
        
1     1      1     1 min    TRUE 
2     3      3     1 max    TRUE 
3     6      1     2 min    TRUE 
4     7      2     1 max    TRUE 
5     8      1     1 min    TRUE 

Depending on the objective, it is then possible to switch between the first and the last value of a local extremas. The second result with last = TRUE could also be obtained from an operation between columns "Idx" and "NB"...

Finally to deal with noise in the data, a function could be implemented to remove fluctuations below a given threshold. Code is not exposed since it goes beyond the initial question. I have wrapped it in a package (mainly to automate the testing process) and I give below a result example:

x_series %>% xtrem::locate_xtrem()

x_series %>% xtrem::locate_xtrem() %>% remove_noise()