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

In the pracma package, use the

tt <- c(1,2,3,2,1, 1, 2, 1)
tt_peaks <- findpeaks(tt, zero = "0", peakpat = NULL,
       minpeakheight = -Inf, minpeakdistance = 1, threshold = 0, npeaks = 0, sortstr = FALSE)

  [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
  [1,]  3    3    1    5
  [2,]  2    7    6    8

That returns a matrix with 4 columns. The first column is showing the local peaks' absolute values. The 2nd column are the indices The 3rd and 4th column are the start and end of the peaks (with potential overlap).

See https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/pracma/versions/1.9.9/topics/findpeaks for details.

One caveat: I used it in a series of non-integers, and the peak was one index too late (for all peaks) and I do not know why. So I had to manually remove "1" from my index vector (no big deal).