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

@Ben's solution is pretty sweet. It doesn't handle the follwing cases though:

# all these return numeric(0):
x <- c(1,2,9,9,2,1,1,5,5,1) # duplicated points at maxima 
which(diff(sign(diff(x)))==-2)+1 
x <- c(2,2,9,9,2,1,1,5,5,1) # duplicated points at start
which(diff(sign(diff(x)))==-2)+1 
x <- c(3,2,9,9,2,1,1,5,5,1) # start is maxima
which(diff(sign(diff(x)))==-2)+1

Here's a more robust (and slower, uglier) version:

localMaxima <- function(x) {
  # Use -Inf instead if x is numeric (non-integer)
  y <- diff(c(-.Machine$integer.max, x)) > 0L
  rle(y)$lengths
  y <- cumsum(rle(y)$lengths)
  y <- y[seq.int(1L, length(y), 2L)]
  if (x[[1]] == x[[2]]) {
    y <- y[-1]
  }
  y
}

x <- c(1,2,9,9,2,1,1,5,5,1)
localMaxima(x) # 3, 8
x <- c(2,2,9,9,2,1,1,5,5,1)
localMaxima(x) # 3, 8
x <- c(3,2,9,9,2,1,1,5,5,1)
localMaxima(x) # 1, 3, 8