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I'm using Python for kernel density estimations and gaussian mixture models to rank likelihood of samples of multidimensional data. Every piece of data is an angle, and I'm not sure how to handle the periodicity of angular data for machine learning.

First I removed all negative angles by adding 360 to them, so all angles that were negative became positive, -179 becoming 181. I believe this elegantly handles the case of -179 an similar being not significantly different than 179 and similar, but it does not handle instances like 359 being not dissimilar from 1.

One way I've thought of approaching the issue is keeping both negative and negative+360 values and using the minimum of the two, but this would require modification of the machine learning algorithms.

Is there a good preprocessing-only solution to this problem? Anything built into scipy or scikit?

Thanks!

calben
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  • When you say "Every piece of data is an angle" you mean both the input features and the target variable (for regression)? – ogrisel Dec 04 '13 at 18:16
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    Not an expert on these scipy or scikit, but you can try replacing the angle by cos(angle), sin(angle) – Tal Darom Dec 04 '13 at 20:10
  • @ogrisel, yes, I mean all input features and target variables are angles. – calben Dec 05 '13 at 03:19
  • @TalDarom, I don't see how that solves the periodicity of the data. Could you elaborate? – calben Dec 05 '13 at 03:21
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    it solves the problem because cos and sin are periodic functions of the angle. e.g. you could use Euclidean distance (or any other standard metric) between these values. – Tal Darom Dec 05 '13 at 07:59

4 Answers4

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As Tal Darom wrote in the comments, you can replace every periodic feature x with two features cos(x) and sin(x) after normalizing to radians. That solves the 359 ≈ 1 problem:

>>> def fromdeg(d):
...     r = d * np.pi / 180.
...     return np.array([np.cos(r), np.sin(r)])
... 
>>> np.linalg.norm(fromdeg(1) - fromdeg(359))
0.03490481287456796
>>> np.linalg.norm(fromdeg(1) - fromdeg(180))
1.9999238461283426
>>> np.linalg.norm(fromdeg(90) - fromdeg(270))
2.0

norm(a - b) is the good old Euclidean distance between vectors a and b. As you can verify using a simple plot, or by realizing that these (cos,sin) pairs are really coordinates on the unit circle, that this distance is maximal (and the dot product minimal) between two of these (cos,sin) vectors when the original angles differ by 180°.

Fred Foo
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An alternative to the methods already posted would be to model the angular variables using the Von Mises distribution.

This distribution appears to be supported by scipy so shouldn't be too difficult to fit into a mixture model.

user1149913
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0

Another simpler way could be to use time as angle measurements than degree measurements (not DMS though). Since many analytics software features time as a datatype, you can use its periodicity to do your job.

But remember, you need to scale 360 degrees to 24 hours.

user3783559
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You need to use the mod function. In straight python this would be (ang2-ang1)%360 but with scipy it looks like you can use numpy.mod() - see the documentation.

neil
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    this is not even close to an answer for the problem. OP is not asking "how to calculate difference between two angles", the question regards completely different aspect, much deeper and harder. It is not the question about the function, or even about any implementation issue. It is a conceptual question regarding usage of custom metrics in a class of clustering models. – lejlot Dec 04 '13 at 19:40
  • @lejlot - About two thirds of the question seemed to be about how to calculate the difference between the angles - even half of the title. I assumed that was where the problem was and that he could do the other stuff. But clearly I misunderstood. – neil Dec 06 '13 at 10:41