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gbutils overview

Table of Contents

Brief description of programs

The programs in gbutils can be divided in four broad classes:

  • Data Manipulation
  • Data Transformation
  • Descriptive Statistics
  • Statistical Tests and Models

The basic operation is essentially the same for all programs: you feed the standard input of the program with data in ASCII format separated by spaces, tabs or newline character. In general, each input line is considered a record and the blank separated entries in each line are considered different fields. The exact way in which different records and fields are treated depends on the program and can vary accordingly to the options specified in the command line (see below).

After the program has read the data from standard input, it performs the required manipulations/analyses and prints the result to standard output, in the form of an ASCII file of newline separated records. Inside each output record, the fields are separated by spaces. Obviously, the meaning of the records and fields depend on the program.

Data Manipulation

These programs do not perform any analysis by themselves. Rather, they are provided as an help to prepare data for subsequent analysis. In particular, gbget is the only program that reads data from file and not from standard input. It can be used to extract data, according to a given pattern, from one or more files and send them, through a pipe |, to other utilities. This program possesses a rather complex set of options. See README.gbget for a tutorial on its use.

gbget
extract data from a tabular input according to a specified pattern. It is possible to access more files at the same time, merge their contents and transpose or flatten the resulting table.
gbfun
compute generic functions on data in a column-wise manner. The function can be applied to all the columns or defined in a recursive way.
gbgrid
generate a grid (i.e. a matrix) of values according to a user specified function
gbboot
generate bootstrapped sequences from data provided sample
gbrand
generated i.i.d. pseudo random variates
gbenv
provide information about the numeric environment and the internal settings of the package

Data transformation

These programs perform basic transformation on input data, which are often considered preliminary to further statistical analysis.

gbmave
print moving statistics (average, variance, etc.) of input data
gbinterp
compute the interpolation on a regular mesh of user provided points. It can also print first and second derivative of the interpolation.
gbfilternear
filter near points in Ecuclidean metrics. Point whose distance is below a given threshold are removed.

Descriptive statistics

These utilities are useful in the representation and description of data. They encompass simple statistics and more "advanced" non parametric methods.

gbdist
cumulative distribution of input data
gbstat
simple descriptive statistics of input data
gbbin
compute binned statistics
gbquant
quantiles of the empirical distribution of input data
gbhisto
histogram for univariate data. Choose between absolute frequencies, relative frequencies and empirical density
gbker
kernel density estimate for univariate data. The type of kernel, the bandwidth and the computation method can be specified at the command line
gbnear
density estimate via nearest neighbors method
gbker2d
kernel density estimate for bivariate data
gbhisto2d
histograms for bivariate data
gbgcorr
Compute the correlation dimension of a time series with a Gaussian kernel.
gbacorr
It computes the autocorrelogram or the cross-autocorrelogram of a series of observations. It reads the data column-wise.
gbxcorr
Compute the cross-covariance and cross-correlation coefficients with and without the removal of the mean of two samples. It reads the data column-wise.

Statistical tests and models

The utilities provide statistical tests to compare different samples and non-parametric method to investigate relationship between paired (or in general compounded) observations.

gbtest
various one and two samples statistical tests. When available, p-score significance is also provided.
gbmodes
find the critical bandwidth for a kernel density estimate to generate a given number of modes and compute the associated p-value using smoothed bootstrap technique
gbbin
the program takes couples of values X Y (separated by spaces), bins them with respect to the first variable and prints statistics of the second variables
gbkreg
compute the kernel non-linear regression function
gbkreg2d
compute the kernel non-linear regression function on three dimensional data
gblreg
compute linear OLS regression
gbglreg
compute generalized linear OLS regression
gbnlreg
compute non linear regression using OLS, MAD or asymmetric MAD estimators
gbnlqreg
compute non linear quantile regression
gbnlmult
contemporaneous least square estimation of a system of non linear equations.
gbnlprobit
estimate a non linear probit model on binary data
gbhill
estimate different families of probability distribution on the extremal data using maximum likelihood.
gblafit
Fit Laplace density using maximum-likelihood.
gbalafit
Fit asymmetric Laplace density using maximum-likelihood.
gbepfit
Fit symmetric power exponential density using maximum-likelihood.
gblaepfit
Fit skewed power exponential density using maximum-likelihood.
gbaepfit
Fit asymmetric power exponential density using maximum-likelihood.

For more information on a specific command, use the -h command line option.

Please, notice that all the programs work by loading the whole set of data in memory before computing the relevant statistics. In this respect, they are probably not suitable to be used on very large datasets.

Understanding Input/Output

All the commands of this package read input in ASCII format. The data should be separated by white characters (spaces or tabs) or newlines. Lines beginning with a fence symbol # are ignored. They are simply skipped by the input routine.

If support for the zlib has been included at compile time (see above) the input ASCII file can be gz-compressed.

A file can contain several blocks of data. Blocks are separated by two consecutive blank lines. In general, all operations are performed on the first block found in the datafile. The program 'gbget' can be used to extract one particular block (or set of blocks) from one file.

Sequential, tabular and compounded input

The utilities in this package use three different ways of reading data from input:

sequential
In 'sequential' format a single dataset is internally build from the data input file. All the entries found on one column of input are read sequentially and put in the same dataset. Notice that the different lines must contain the same number of entries or NAN values are generated.
tabular
In 'tabular' format, each column of the input is treated as a different dataset; the program will internally create a list of datasets, one for each column of input. The different entries on one line are then put inside different sets. Notice that, in this case, the number of fields in the first non-comment non-empty line decides the number of datasets. All subsequent input lines should contain the same number of fields (but see below).
compounded
In 'compounded' format the program reads a fixed number of fields from each line. Each line is internally stored as an n-tuple (a couple or a triplet) and treated accordingly. Notice that if some line contains more fields than needed, the extra fields are ignored.

An example can clarify the difference between the 'sequential', 'tabular' and 'compounded' format. Suppose to have the following input datafile

1.0 2.0 3.0
4.0 5.0 6.0
7.0 8.0 9.0

using the 'sequential' input the unique dataset {1.0,2.0,3.0,4.0,...,9.0} is internally generated by the program. Notice the ordering: all the entries of one line are inserted in the internal dataset before the next line is red.

In 'tabular' format, the program builds instead three different datasets: {1.0,4.0,7.0}, {2.0,5.0,8.0} and {3.0,6.0,9.0} and use each set separately for its subsequent duties (topically reproducing the same statistical analysis for each set).

In 'compounded' format, assuming that the program accepts couples, the following array of ordered couples is generated {(1.0,2.0),(4.0,5.0),(7.0,8.0)}. Notice that this is a single dataset, made of couples of associated values.

When available, the "sequential" format is the default while the "tabular" format is activated with the option '-t'. See the Programs summary table for the list of input format accepted by the different utilities.

Missing values and NaN management

When the conversion of an input entry to an internal floating point number cannot be performed, or when, on an input line, there are not enough values for the required "tabular" or "compounded" format, a NAN (not-a-number) value is generated. This approach is introduced to make possible the manipulation of files with an uneven number of entries in different columns or with "non numerical" values.

The following utilities automatically remove the NaN values from their input: gbstat, gbdist and gbquant.

The other utilities do handle NaN values as expected: if NaN values are present they typically return NaN output. In this case, the option D of the gbget utility is provided to remove all the lines containing NaN entries. This program can be used in a pipe like

...| gbget '()D' | ....

to treat the data before passing them to other NaN-sensitive utilities.

Radix and thousands separator

In addition to the radix symbol which separates the fractional and the integer part of the number, sometimes data are reported with a thousand separator symbol. For instance "one million" could be written "1,000,000.00". The character used to separate thousands and the fractional part are defined inside the C locale. Programs in the gbutils package can automatically recognize the locale settings and process these entries accordingly. Please use "gbenv" to see the definitions in use. Changing the locale typically amount simply to the redefinition of the LANG environment variable

# export LANG="en_US"

A list of the available locale can be obtained with the locale program

# locale -a

and the actual setting verified with

# locale

For more details refer to the locale documentation.

Output format and precision

In general, the output from the different programs is made of newline separated records of space separated fields of standard ASCII characters, which represent floating point numbers. The default format is scientific notation with a precision of six digits. The format and the precision can be changed using the environment variable GB_OUT_FLOAT_FORMAT. This variable can be set to any printf (the standard library C function) meaningful string. For instance with

# export GB_OUT_FLOAT_FORMAT="%.8e"

the precision is extended to eight digit. While with

# export GB_OUT_FLOAT_FORMAT="%.fe"

the scientific notation is replaced with a fixed-point notation. Please, refer to the printf documentation for further details.

There is also a second variable, GB_OUT_EMPTY_FORMAT, which can be used to tune the comment headings that many programs generate with the verbose option -v. Notice that it is automatically set to a value which is consistent with the float format chosen, so in general it is a good idea not to change it explicitly.

Functional expressions

The functional expressions used in various utilities, like gbget, gbnlreg, or gbfun, are interpreted via the matheval library.

Supported constants are (names that should be used are given in parenthesis): e (e), log2(e) (log2e), log10(e) (log10e), ln(2) (ln2), ln(10) (ln10), pi (pi), pi/2 (pi_2), pi/4 (pi_4), 1/pi (1_pi), 2/pi (2_pi), 2/sqrt(pi) (2_sqrtpi), sqrt(2) (sqrt2) and sqrt(1/2) (sqrt1_2).

Supported elementary functions are (names that should be used are given in parenthesis): exponential (exp), logarithmic (log), square root (sqrt), sine (sin), cosine (cos), tangent (tan), cotangent (cot), secant (sec), cosecant (csc), inverse sine (asin), inverse cosine (acos), inverse tangent (atan), inverse cotangent (acot), inverse secant (asec), inverse cosecant (acsc), hyperbolic sine (sinh), cosine (cosh), hyperbolic tangent (tanh), hyperbolic cotangent (coth), hyperbolic secant (sech), hyperbolic cosecant (csch), hyperbolic inverse sine (asinh), hyperbolic inverse cosine (acosh), hyperbolic inverse tangent (atanh), hyperbolic inverse cotangent (acoth), hyperbolic inverse secant (asech), hyperbolic inverse cosecant (acsch), absolute value (abs), Heaviside step function (step) with value 1 defined for x = 0, Dirac delta function with infinity (delta) and not-a-number (nandelta) values defined for x = 0, and error function (erf).

Supported unary operation is unary minus ('-').

Supported binary operations are addition ('+'), subtraction ('-') multiplication ('*'), division multiplication ('/') and exponentiation ('^').

Usual mathematical rules regarding operation precedence apply. Parenthesis ('(' and ')') could be used to change priority order.

Numerical Error handling

The default behaviour of Gnu Scientific Library functions is to abort the execution of the program if a numeric error is produced. Some of these errors, especially underflow errors, are tolerable inside a computation. The 'gbutils' package provides a way of switching off the GSL error handling. It is sufficient to set the environment variable GB_ERROR_HANDLER_OFF using

# export GB_ERROR_HANDLER_OFF=

and all the programs will ignore numerical errors. This feature must be used carefully, after checking that the loss of precision implied by the presence of these errors can be considered tolerable for the actual computation one wants to perform. The default behaviour can be recovered using

# unset GB_ERROR_HANDLER_OFF

Binary format

THIS IS AN EXPERIMENTAL FEATURE

Like ASCII files, the binary files are structured as sequences of separate blocks. Each block is made of

  • one size_t with number of columns C
  • C size_t with the length of the rows, R1 … RC
  • the data stored sequentially column by column, for a total number equal to R1+R2+…+RC

This structure allows the storage of non matrices structures in binary format. If lengths are different, the missing values are replaced with NANs. This mimic the behaviour of ASCII data handling.

Notice that blocks are simply written one after the other. No particular separators are inserted between them.

Implementation: the option -b redefines the function used to read and/or write data.

This feature has been implemented for gbget, gbmstat and gbfun.

Graphic output

As previously mentioned, the output of many programs in the gbutils package, like gbhisto or gbker, is intended to be plotted and not directly read from the terminal. It is generally composed of records and fields of standard ASCII characters. This type of output can be displayed using the various plotting utilities commonly available in Unix systems. We shortly review below three possibilities.

GNU plotutils package

The plotutils package can be found here. It contains the program graph which generate a plot starting from input data. For example to obtain a plot of the kernel density of the data in file datafile.dat one can use

gbker < datafile.dat | graph -T x

where -T x choose xwindow as output device.

Gnuplot interactive session

An alternative is to use the powerful plotting environment provided by gnuplot. The program can be found here.

From inside a gnuplot session, the previous kernel density can be obtained with

plot "< gbker < datafile.dat " 

see Gnuplot documentations for details.

Gnuplot's plot from command line

As the example above shows, in order to plot the output of a command inside gnuplot you need to put it inside an expression delimited by "< and ". Moreover, all double quotes " have to be escaped with a backslash \. These requirements can lead to cumbersome expressions when complicated commands are necessary. Moreover, starting an interactive gnuplot session and writing the expression whose output should be plotted doesn't seem so attractive when one needs fast, simple plotting, for exploratory purposes. These are the cases foe qhich the command gbplot is provided. This is a shell script that accept the data to be plotted as input and the directive on how to plot it on the command line.

The basic usage is as follows

gbplot [options] [plot|splot] <plotting options> < datafile

or

command pipe | gbplot [options] [plot|splot] <plotting options>

The command plot or splot are required. One can provide further plotting options by inserting them after these command. For example one can plot the kernel density estimate using

gbker < datafile.dat | gbplot plot

In this way the density is plotted using simple points. To use the fancier gnuplot's 'histeps' style use instead

gbker < datafile.dat | gbplot plot with histeps

The syntax of the plotting options is exactly the same that would be used inside gnuplot, after a the plot or splot command. For instance to specify a range for the x values use

gbker < datafile.dat | gbplot plot '[-1:1]' with histeps

It is also possible to obtain multiple plots of the data using the gnuplot special file name '""', as in

gbker < datafile.dat | gbplot plot 'w p , "" w l'

This command draws the kernel estimate two times: the first with points, the second with a line (as specified by the w l expression).

gbplot also possesses several options. They must be specified before the plot or splot command. To insert a title in the plot use the option -t

gbker < datafile.dat | gbplot -t Title plot with histeps

Terminal type and output file can be specified with the -T and -o options respectively. The command

gbker < datafile.dat | gbplot -T pdf -o output.pdf plot with histeps

produce a pdf version fo the plot and save it in 'output.pdf'.

Finally, if an interactive manipulation of plot parameters or data is required, you can use the option -i. This option opens an interactive gnuplot session, allowing for direct manipulation of plot settings and parameters

gbker < datafile.dat | gbplot -i plot with histeps

Once the session is closed, the output is saved in a file using a specific terminal if options -o and -T have been specified.

Programs summary table

Name Input Type External lib NAN  
gbget c+ (matheval) *  
gbfun c+ matheval    
gbgrid no matheval    
gbrand no gsl    
gbboot s,t,c+ (gsl)    
gbenv no      
gbmave s,t   *  
gbinterp c,2 gsl    
gbfilternear c+      
gbdist s,t   *  
gbstat s,t   *  
gbquant s,t,c+   *  
gbhisto s,t      
gbker s gsl    
gbnear s      
gbhisto2d c2      
gbgcorr s      
gbacorr c1,c2      
gbxcorr c2      
gbker2d c2      
gbbin c+      
gbtest c+ (gsl) *  
gbmodes s gsl    
gbbin t      
gbkreg c2 gsl    
gbkreg2d c3      
gblreg c2 gsl    
gbglreg c+ gsl    
gbnlreg c+ gsl,matheval    
gbnlqreg c+ gsl,matheval    
gbhill s gsl    
gbnlmult c+ gsl,matheval    
gbnlprobit c+ gsl,matheval    
gbnlpanel c+ gsl,matheval *  
gbnlpolyit c+ gsl,matheval    
gblafit s gsl    
gbalafit s gsl    
gbepfit s gsl    
gblaepfit s gsl    
gbaepfit s gsl    

Input Type: 's' sequential; 't' tabular; 'c' compounded c2 read couples, c3 triplets, c+ a variable number of columns; 'no' no input required

External libs: gsl: Gnu Scientific Library matheval: GNU matheval library () means optional dependence (special features are available only if the library is found)

NAN: program automatically ignores NAN values in computations

Author: Giulio Bottazzi

Created: 2024-02-25 dom 12:38

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