Thursday, November 24, 2016

Finding zeros of data using QSoas

QSoas does not provide by default commands to detect zeros of data, and the reason for that is that it is simple, using the integrate command to convert this problem into a peak-finding problem, which can be solved using the find-peaks command. Here is that strategy applied to determining the zeros of the 0-th order bessel function:

QSoas> generate-buffer -10 10 bessel_j0(x) /samples=100001
QSoas> integrate
Current buffer now is: 'generated_int.dat'
QSoas> find-peaks
Found 6 peaks
buffer what x y index width left_width right_width
generated_int.dat min -8.6538 -0.201157042341714 6731 1.7798 0.905999999999999 0.873800000000001
generated_int.dat max -5.52 0.398165469321319 22400 2.2854 1.1862 1.0992
generated_int.dat min -2.4048 -0.403288737672291 37976 1.8232 0.973 0.850199999999999
generated_int.dat max 2.4048 2.53731134529594 62024 nan 2.2026 nan
generated_int.dat min 5.52 1.73585713830231 77600 nan 5.7198 nan
generated_int.dat max 8.6538 2.33517964996535 93269 nan 8.5532 nan

Compare that with the values given on Mathematica's website. This strategy is reasonably resistant to noise, since integration decreases high-frequency noise, but you may have to play with the /window option to find-peaks to avoid detecting the same zero (peak) several times.

Hopefully, I'll come back with more regular postings of tips and tricks !

2 comments:

Vincent Fourmond said...

Oops, updated broken documentation links

Vincent Fourmond said...

Note that this will not work in some corner cases, i.e. when the first derivative is also 0 when the function is 0. I expect these cases not to happen too often when dealing with real data, though. Thanks to Thomas Viehmann for pointing this out.