Introduction

The objective here is to label figures such as the one below (call the shape of the graph as ‘A’) as a banded figure.Now terminology can be varied. One can say that the density of the observations is clearly bimodal. And indeed it is.

But consider this figure (B),which our algorithm will observe and need to classify

This is case of a level shift. In each regime (or level) the density of the observations are unimodal but combined the density is definitely bimodal. The rub here is that the observations are not identically distribution and most schemes for checking bimodality (or mixtures) assume the data is identically distributed.

So we have a classification problem and need a way to assign figures such as A above to the banded class. We have two approaches. Each have aspects to them that are more intuitive than others.

Clustering

On the y-axis the observations in A clearly belong to two clusters. The idea is that if two distinct clusters do exist, then a k-means clustering algorithm repeated many times (since the k-means is sensitive to seed centers) will be able to detect such clusters. Indeed it does (with our data). Let’s assume we can assign each observation to 2 detected clusters (these may not be ‘real’ clusters). Some observations follow:

1. The classifier is sensitive to the proportion of the two clusters. If one is much larger than the other (typical sample size is 60-100 observations) say in the ratio of 85:15, then the figure looks like a case of one cluster and several outliers. See this figure

What we are trying to detect is a regular switching between two generating distributions. So this ratio becomes a parameter. We want to be able detect figures with two ‘strongly developed’ bands.

2. As we’ll see in point (4), we have a cutoff based on distance. To make this cutoff make sense across all figures which can have different scales, we standardize the data to unit scale and zero mean. Also we cap outliers to say +/- 4. Though this is a parameter, the rule is not very much affected by it, mostly because we don’t have too many outliers.

3. As mentioned above, k-means can return different clusters depending on the seed. If there are two distinct clusters it is expected that in N repetitions, these clusters will appear majority number of times. This N is also a parameter.

4. The k-means algorithm can return false positives. For example, the k-means will return two clusters when given data from $Uniform(0,1)$. To identify sharply defined clusters we create a ‘distance’ measure. There are two clusters with centers $C_1$ and $C_2$. For a given observation $Y_i$ let it be assigned to cluster $C_i$. Then $\frac{ | Y_i - C_i|}{ |Y_i-C_1| + | Y_i-C_2|}$ is a measure of how strongly the $Y_i$ belongs to cluster $C_i$. The mean of this across all points $Y_i$ is a measure of how strong the clustering is. This mean ought to be small.

We also confirm that means of the observations in each cluster are statistically different. I’m not sure if this second condition is actually necessary

5. We also do not want the figures such as B to tagged as banded. There are two approaches.

a) Assign the points indices 1 to number of observations. If it is a level shift then the group of indices in one cluster will have a different center than the indices in the second group. A Wilcoxon test will suffice to check this. A problem with this, as in the below figure is that it will reject an obviously bandied graph that has shown a level shift.

b) A way around this is to divide the x-axis into windows of size $h$ and compute the above the algorithm for each window. If the measure in (4) are acceptable in all the windows, then we can conclude the curve is banded even if it has a level shift. This approach will reject figures such as B but accept the above figure since it is banded in each window. This approach is sensitive to the number of observations in the window and works if we have plenty of data. Which is not always the case.

6. Ultimately, we have a rule, once we have clusters, if

• the means of the cluster sufficiently different?
• there is no level shift (5a is not rejected)
• the separation score (defined in (4)) is less than some cut off (in our case 0.14)

then we consider the figure as banded.

See this link (be patient, 3MB of 220 bokeh plots) for an example of figures marked as banded (each plot has a number id:## x1_x2 below it. Figures with x2==0 are labelled as banded). The code for this is https://gist.github.com/anonymous/b182c1a175171117579b. There are 220 combinations of platform, test suite and compile options.

Mixture of Gaussians

This is a statistical model based approach. Here we consider the observations to be independent and identically distributed (as we’ll see we’ll handle the not identical bit in a manner similar to 5(a) above) from

where $0 < \lambda < 1$. Using the mixtools package in R, the above model is fit using an iterative Expectation Maximization(EM) approach. What it returns us (after several iterations)

• the value of $\lambda$
• the values of $\mu$ and $\sigma$ for each component
• the posterior probabilities of $Y_i$ belonging to each component

We classify an observation $Y_i$ belonging to cluster $C_i$ if the posterior probability of it belong to cluster $C_i$ is greatest. The classification rule for this is a bit similar to the the clustering approach.

1. We check that $\lambda$ is not too close to 0 or 1, for then we have a case similar to (1) in the clustering approach.
2. In a given cluster (clusters 1 or 2), for every point we compute the difference in posterior probability of belonging to component 1 or 2. This is averaged across the cluster (for each cluster) and we take the minimum value. We apply a cutoff 0.9. That is in both clusters the average probability of belonging to the assigned cluster is more than probability of belonging to the other cluster by at least 0.9
3. We apply a similar condition as 5(a) to reject level shifts

A link to these figures can be found(be patient, 3MB of 220 bokeh plots) here. Code for this is here.

A natural question, isn’t there a hypothesis test for whether one component is better than two (or vice versa)? This is a complicated problem and often involves visual inspection. Using this test and then applying rules (like above) wouldn’t make it much more sophisticated. However this is something I will look into more.

Comparison

Using the rules above they both work very well. And indeed

• this page is the list of all platform/test suite/compile options that were flagged by kmeans but not by the mixture approach
• this page are the figures considered by banded by the mixture approach but not by the kmeans approach.

The

• kmeans approach is fairly easy to understand and implement.
• the mixture model is probabilistic and the rule in (2) for the mixture model is easier to understand that the one in (4) for kmeans.
• we do not need to standardize the observations in the mixture method since we discriminate on the probability scale. This can be fixed in kmeans by using probabilistic clustering.
• both exist in Python.

Given this, I would recommend the kmeans approach since it is very easy to understand even for someone not familiar with probability. Moreover, we can expand the kmeans approach to a probabilistic clustering approach to match something similar to the mixture component method.

But When to Use?

So when is this important? We can always not worry about the bimodality and ignore this information. If we use a t-test to compare means then we increase the standard error of the test (because the bimodal distribution will have a larger standard deviation). Thus when comparing new data with old using a t-test and ignoring bimodality, we tend to not reject the null hypothesis of no change.

But if we are trying to detect very large changes for a group of new observations , then we not so affected. But this all depends on the nature of the standard deviation with respect to the means of the reference data.

In general, if we can conclude the data is bimodal, we classify observations to each component/cluster. We could construct a test with improved efficiency with this new information.

Other Methods

The first method that comes to mind is Kernel Density estimation (KDE). In this approach, the most sensitive parameter is the bandwidth $h$. KDE methods can also be non parametric which removes the Gaussian assumption. Some guiding parameters would still need to be chosen such as the mixing proportion ($\lambda$ in the Mixture section)