Skip to main content
`Ctrl`+`K`

# Kernel density estimation

A common task in statistics is to estimate the probability density function (PDF) of a random variable from a set of data samples. This task is called density estimation. The most well-known tool to do this is the histogram. A histogram is a useful tool for visualization (mainly because everyone understands it), but doesn’t use the available data very efficiently. Kernel density estimation (KDE) is a more efficient tool for the same task. The `scipy.stats.gaussian_kde` estimator can be used to estimate the PDF of univariate as well as multivariate data. It works best if the data is unimodal.

## Univariate estimation

We start with a minimal amount of data in order to see how `scipy.stats.gaussian_kde` works and what the different options for bandwidth selection do. The data sampled from the PDF are shown as blue dashes at the bottom of the figure (this is called a rug plot):

    >>> import numpy as np
    >>> from scipy import stats
    >>> import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

    >>> x1 = np.array([-7, -5, 1, 4, 5], dtype=np.float64)
    >>> kde1 = stats.gaussian_kde(x1)
    >>> kde2 = stats.gaussian_kde(x1, bw_method='silverman')

    >>> fig = plt.figure()
    >>> ax = fig.add_subplot(111)

    >>> ax.plot(x1, np.zeros(x1.shape), 'b+', ms=20)  # rug plot
    >>> x_eval = np.linspace(-10, 10, num=200)
    >>> ax.plot(x_eval, kde1(x_eval), 'k-', label="Scott's Rule")
    >>> ax.plot(x_eval, kde2(x_eval), 'r-', label="Silverman's Rule")

    >>> plt.show()

We see that there is very little difference between Scott’s Rule and Silverman’s Rule, and that the bandwidth selection with a limited amount of data is probably a bit too wide. We can define our own bandwidth function to get a less smoothed-out result.

    >>> def my_kde_bandwidth(obj, fac=1./5):
    ...     """We use Scott's Rule, multiplied by a constant factor."""
    ...     return np.power(obj.n, -1./(obj.d+4)) * fac

    >>> fig = plt.figure()
    >>> ax = fig.add_subplot(111)

    >>> ax.plot(x1, np.zeros(x1.shape), 'b+', ms=20)  # rug plot
    >>> kde3 = stats.gaussian_kde(x1, bw_method=my_kde_bandwidth)
    >>> ax.plot(x_eval, kde3(x_eval), 'g-', label="With smaller BW")

    >>> plt.show()

We see that if we set the bandwidth to be very narrow, the obtained estimate for the probability density function (PDF) is simply the sum of Gaussians around each data point.

We now take a more realistic example and look at the difference between the two available bandwidth selection rules. Those rules are known to work well for (close to) normal distributions, but even for unimodal distributions that are quite strongly non-normal they work reasonably well. As a non-normal distribution we take a Student’s T distribution with 5 degrees of freedom.

    import numpy as np
    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
    from scipy import stats

    rng = np.random.default_rng()
    x1 = rng.normal(size=200)  # random data, normal distribution
    xs = np.linspace(x1.min()-1, x1.max()+1, 200)

    kde1 = stats.gaussian_kde(x1)
    kde2 = stats.gaussian_kde(x1, bw_method='silverman')

    fig = plt.figure(figsize=(8, 6))

    ax1 = fig.add_subplot(211)
    ax1.plot(x1, np.zeros(x1.shape), 'b+', ms=12)  # rug plot
    ax1.plot(xs, kde1(xs), 'k-', label="Scott's Rule")
    ax1.plot(xs, kde2(xs), 'b-', label="Silverman's Rule")
    ax1.plot(xs, stats.norm.pdf(xs), 'r--', label="True PDF")

    ax1.set_xlabel('x')
    ax1.set_ylabel('Density')
    ax1.set_title("Normal (top) and Student's T$_{df=5}$ (bottom) distributions")
    ax1.legend(loc=1)

    x2 = stats.t.rvs(5, size=200, random_state=rng)  # random data, T distribution
    xs = np.linspace(x2.min() - 1, x2.max() + 1, 200)

    kde3 = stats.gaussian_kde(x2)
    kde4 = stats.gaussian_kde(x2, bw_method='silverman')

    ax2 = fig.add_subplot(212)
    ax2.plot(x2, np.zeros(x2.shape), 'b+', ms=12)  # rug plot
    ax2.plot(xs, kde3(xs), 'k-', label="Scott's Rule")
    ax2.plot(xs, kde4(xs), 'b-', label="Silverman's Rule")
    ax2.plot(xs, stats.t.pdf(xs, 5), 'r--', label="True PDF")

    ax2.set_xlabel('x')
    ax2.set_ylabel('Density')

    plt.show()

We now take a look at a bimodal distribution with one wider and one narrower Gaussian feature. We expect that this will be a more difficult density to approximate, due to the different bandwidths required to accurately resolve each feature.

    >>> from functools import partial

    >>> loc1, scale1, size1 = (-2, 1, 175)
    >>> loc2, scale2, size2 = (2, 0.2, 50)
    >>> x2 = np.concatenate([np.random.normal(loc=loc1, scale=scale1, size=size1),
    ...                      np.random.normal(loc=loc2, scale=scale2, size=size2)])

    >>> x_eval = np.linspace(x2.min() - 1, x2.max() + 1, 500)

    >>> kde = stats.gaussian_kde(x2)
    >>> kde2 = stats.gaussian_kde(x2, bw_method='silverman')
    >>> kde3 = stats.gaussian_kde(x2, bw_method=partial(my_kde_bandwidth, fac=0.2))
    >>> kde4 = stats.gaussian_kde(x2, bw_method=partial(my_kde_bandwidth, fac=0.5))

    >>> pdf = stats.norm.pdf
    >>> bimodal_pdf = pdf(x_eval, loc=loc1, scale=scale1) * float(size1) / x2.size + \
    ...               pdf(x_eval, loc=loc2, scale=scale2) * float(size2) / x2.size

    >>> fig = plt.figure(figsize=(8, 6))
    >>> ax = fig.add_subplot(111)

    >>> ax.plot(x2, np.zeros(x2.shape), 'b+', ms=12)
    >>> ax.plot(x_eval, kde(x_eval), 'k-', label="Scott's Rule")
    >>> ax.plot(x_eval, kde2(x_eval), 'b-', label="Silverman's Rule")
    >>> ax.plot(x_eval, kde3(x_eval), 'g-', label="Scott * 0.2")
    >>> ax.plot(x_eval, kde4(x_eval), 'c-', label="Scott * 0.5")
    >>> ax.plot(x_eval, bimodal_pdf, 'r--', label="Actual PDF")

    >>> ax.set_xlim([x_eval.min(), x_eval.max()])
    >>> ax.legend(loc=2)
    >>> ax.set_xlabel('x')
    >>> ax.set_ylabel('Density')
    >>> plt.show()

As expected, the KDE is not as close to the true PDF as we would like due to the different characteristic sizes of the two features of the bimodal distribution. By halving the default bandwidth (`Scott * 0.5`), we can do somewhat better, while using a bandwidth one-fifth that of the default does not smooth enough. What we really need, though, in this case, is a non-uniform (adaptive) bandwidth.

## Multivariate estimation

With `scipy.stats.gaussian_kde` we can perform multivariate, as well as univariate estimation. We demonstrate the bivariate case. First, we generate some random data with a model in which the two variates are correlated.

    >>> def measure(n):
    ...     """Measurement model, return two coupled measurements."""
    ...     m1 = np.random.normal(size=n)
    ...     m2 = np.random.normal(scale=0.5, size=n)
    ...     return m1+m2, m1-m2

    >>> m1, m2 = measure(2000)
    >>> xmin = m1.min()
    >>> xmax = m1.max()
    >>> ymin = m2.min()
    >>> ymax = m2.max()

Then we apply the KDE to the data:

    >>> X, Y = np.mgrid[xmin:xmax:100j, ymin:ymax:100j]
    >>> positions = np.vstack([X.ravel(), Y.ravel()])
    >>> values = np.vstack([m1, m2])
    >>> kernel = stats.gaussian_kde(values)
    >>> Z = np.reshape(kernel.evaluate(positions).T, X.shape)

Finally, we plot the estimated bivariate distribution as a colormap and plot the individual data points on top.

    >>> fig = plt.figure(figsize=(8, 6))
    >>> ax = fig.add_subplot(111)

    >>> ax.imshow(np.rot90(Z), cmap=plt.cm.gist_earth_r,
    ...           extent=[xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax])
    >>> ax.plot(m1, m2, 'k.', markersize=2)

    >>> ax.set_xlim([xmin, xmax])
    >>> ax.set_ylim([ymin, ymax])

    >>> plt.show()