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

This function by Timothée Poisot is handy for noisy series:

May 3, 2009
An Algorithm To Find Local Extrema In A Vector
Filed under: Algorithm — Tags: Extrema, Time series — Timothée Poisot @ 6:46pm

I spend some time looking for an algorithm to find local extrema in a vector (time series). The solution I used is to “walk” through the vector by step larger than 1, in order to retain only one value even when the values are very noisy (see the picture at the end of the post).

It goes like this :

findpeaks <- function(vec,bw=1,x.coo=c(1:length(vec)))
{
    pos.x.max <- NULL
    pos.y.max <- NULL
    pos.x.min <- NULL
    pos.y.min <- NULL   for(i in 1:(length(vec)-1))     {       if((i+1+bw)>length(vec)){
                sup.stop <- length(vec)}else{sup.stop <- i+1+bw
                }
        if((i-bw)<1){inf.stop <- 1}else{inf.stop <- i-bw}
        subset.sup <- vec[(i+1):sup.stop]
        subset.inf <- vec[inf.stop:(i-1)]

        is.max   <- sum(subset.inf > vec[i]) == 0
        is.nomin <- sum(subset.sup > vec[i]) == 0

        no.max   <- sum(subset.inf > vec[i]) == length(subset.inf)
        no.nomin <- sum(subset.sup > vec[i]) == length(subset.sup)

        if(is.max & is.nomin){
            pos.x.max <- c(pos.x.max,x.coo[i])
            pos.y.max <- c(pos.y.max,vec[i])
        }
        if(no.max & no.nomin){
            pos.x.min <- c(pos.x.min,x.coo[i])
            pos.y.min <- c(pos.y.min,vec[i])
        }
    }
    return(list(pos.x.max,pos.y.max,pos.x.min,pos.y.min))
}

Link to original blog post