What is the best way to find the period of a (repeating) list in Mathematica?

Question

What is the best way to find the period in a repeating list?

For example:

a = {4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2}

has repeat

Answer 1

Above methods are better if you have no noise. If your signal is only approximate then Fourier transform methods might be useful. I'll illustrate with a "parametrized" setup wherein the length and number of repetitions of the base signal, the length of the trailing part, and a bound on the noise perturbation are all variables one can play with.

noise = 20;
extra = 40;
baselen = 103;
base = RandomInteger[10000, {baselen}];
repeat = 5;
signal = Flatten[Join[ConstantArray[base, repeat], Take[base, extra]]];
noisysignal = signal + RandomInteger[{-noise, noise}, Length[signal]];

We compute the absolute value of the FFT. We adjoin zeros to both ends. The object will be to threshold by comparing to neighbors.

sigfft = Join[{0.}, Abs[Fourier[noisysignal]], {0}];

Now we create two 0-1 vectors. In one we threshold by making a 1 for each element in the fft that is greater than twice the geometric mean of its two neighbors. In the other we use the average (arithmetic mean) but we lower the size bound to 3/4. This was based on some experimentation. We count the number of 1s in each case. Ideally we'd get 100 for each, as that would be the number of nonzeros in a "perfect" case of no noise and no tail part.

In[419]:= 
thresh1 = 
  Table[If[sigfft[[j]]^2 > 2*sigfft[[j - 1]]*sigfft[[j + 1]], 1, 
    0], {j, 2, Length[sigfft] - 1}];
count1 = Count[thresh1, 1]
thresh2 = 
  Table[If[sigfft[[j]] > 3/4*(sigfft[[j - 1]] + sigfft[[j + 1]]), 1, 
    0], {j, 2, Length[sigfft] - 1}];
count2 = Count[thresh2, 1]

Out[420]= 114

Out[422]= 100

Now we get our best guess as to the value of "repeats", by taking the floor of the total length over the average of our counts.

approxrepeats = Floor[2*Length[signal]/(count1 + count2)]
Out[423]= 5

So we have found that the basic signal is repeated 5 times. That can give a start toward refining to estimate the correct length (baselen, above). To that end we might try removing elements at the end and seeing when we get ffts closer to actually having runs of four 0s between nonzero values.

Something else that might work for estimating number of repeats is finding the modal number of zeros in run length encoding of the thresholded ffts. While I have not actually tried that, it looks like it might be robust to bad choices in the details of how one does the thresholding (mine were just experiments that seem to work).

Daniel Lichtblau