Is there a numpy builtin to reject outliers from a list

Question

Is there a numpy builtin to do something like the following? That is, take a list d and return a list filtered_d with any outlying elements removed

Answer 1

This method is almost identical to yours, just more numpyst (also working on numpy arrays only):

def reject_outliers(data, m=2):
    return data[abs(data - np.mean(data)) < m * np.std(data)]

Answer 2

Consider that all the above methods fail when your standard deviation gets very large due to huge outliers.

(Simalar as the average caluclation fails and should rather caluclate the median. Though, the average is "more prone to such an error as the stdDv".)

You could try to iteratively apply your algorithm or you filter using the interquartile range: (here "factor" relates to a n*sigma range, yet only when your data follows a Gaussian distribution)

import numpy as np

def sortoutOutliers(dataIn,factor):
    quant3, quant1 = np.percentile(dataIn, [75 ,25])
    iqr = quant3 - quant1
    iqrSigma = iqr/1.34896
    medData = np.median(dataIn)
    dataOut = [ x for x in dataIn if ( (x > medData - factor* iqrSigma) and (x < medData + factor* iqrSigma) ) ] 
    return(dataOut)

Answer 3

For a set of images (each image has 3 dimensions), where I wanted to reject outliers for each pixel I used:

mean = np.mean(imgs, axis=0)
std = np.std(imgs, axis=0)
mask = np.greater(0.5 * std + 1, np.abs(imgs - mean))
masked = np.multiply(imgs, mask)

Then it is possible to compute the mean:

masked_mean = np.divide(np.sum(masked, axis=0), np.sum(mask, axis=0))

(I use it for Background Subtraction)

Answer 4

An alternative is to make a robust estimation of the standard deviation (assuming Gaussian statistics). Looking up online calculators, I see that the 90% percentile corresponds to 1.2815σ and the 95% is 1.645σ (http://vassarstats.net/tabs.html?#z)

As a simple example:

import numpy as np

# Create some random numbers
x = np.random.normal(5, 2, 1000)

# Calculate the statistics
print("Mean= ", np.mean(x))
print("Median= ", np.median(x))
print("Max/Min=", x.max(), " ", x.min())
print("StdDev=", np.std(x))
print("90th Percentile", np.percentile(x, 90))

# Add a few large points
x[10] += 1000
x[20] += 2000
x[30] += 1500

# Recalculate the statistics
print()
print("Mean= ", np.mean(x))
print("Median= ", np.median(x))
print("Max/Min=", x.max(), " ", x.min())
print("StdDev=", np.std(x))
print("90th Percentile", np.percentile(x, 90))

# Measure the percentile intervals and then estimate Standard Deviation of the distribution, both from median to the 90th percentile and from the 10th to 90th percentile
p90 = np.percentile(x, 90)
p10 = np.percentile(x, 10)
p50 = np.median(x)
# p50 to p90 is 1.2815 sigma
rSig = (p90-p50)/1.2815
print("Robust Sigma=", rSig)

rSig = (p90-p10)/(2*1.2815)
print("Robust Sigma=", rSig)

The output I get is:

Mean=  4.99760520022
Median=  4.95395274981
Max/Min= 11.1226494654   -2.15388472011
Sigma= 1.976629928
90th Percentile 7.52065379649

Mean=  9.64760520022
Median=  4.95667658782
Max/Min= 2205.43861943   -2.15388472011
Sigma= 88.6263902244
90th Percentile 7.60646688694

Robust Sigma= 2.06772555531
Robust Sigma= 1.99878292462

Which is close to the expected value of 2.

If we want to remove points above/below 5 standard deviations (with 1000 points we would expect 1 value > 3 standard deviations):

y = x[abs(x - p50) < rSig*5]

# Print the statistics again
print("Mean= ", np.mean(y))
print("Median= ", np.median(y))
print("Max/Min=", y.max(), " ", y.min())
print("StdDev=", np.std(y))

Which gives:

Mean=  4.99755359935
Median=  4.95213030447
Max/Min= 11.1226494654   -2.15388472011
StdDev= 1.97692712883

I have no idea which approach is the more efficent/robust