ctx_tree: Build a context tree for a discrete time series

In mixvlmc: Variable Length Markov Chains with Covariates

Build a context tree for a discrete time series

Description

This function builds a context tree for a time series.

Usage

ctx_tree(
  x,
  min_size = 2L,
  max_depth = 100L,
  keep_position = TRUE,
  backend = getOption("mixvlmc.backend", "R")
)

Arguments

x	a discrete time series; can be numeric, character, factor or logical.
min_size	integer >= 1 (default: 2). Minimum number of observations for a context to be included in the tree.
max_depth	integer >= 1 (default: 100). Maximum length of a context to be included in the tree.
keep_position	logical (default: TRUE). Should the context tree keep the position of the contexts.
backend	"R" or "C++" (default: as specified by the "mixvlmc.backend" option). Specifies the implementation used to represent the context tree and to built it. See details.

Details

The tree represents all the sequences of symbols/states of length smaller than max_depth that appear at least min_size times in the time series and stores the frequencies of the states that follow each context. Optionally, the positions of the contexts in the time series can be stored in the tree.

Value

a context tree (of class that inherits from ctx_tree).

Back ends

Two back ends are available to compute context trees:

• the "R" back end represents the tree in pure R data structures (nested lists) that be easily processed further in pure R (C++ helper functions are used to speed up the construction).

• the "C++" back end represents the tree with C++ classes. This back end is considered experimental. The tree is built with an optimised suffix tree algorithm which speeds up the construction by at least a factor 10 in standard settings. As the tree is kept outside of R direct reach, context trees built with the C++ back end must be restored after a saveRDS()/readRDS() sequence. This is done automatically by recomputing completely the context tree.

Examples

dts <- c(0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0)
## get all contexts of length 2
dts_ctree <- ctx_tree(dts, min_size = 1, max_depth = 2)
draw(dts_ctree)

mixvlmc documentation built on June 8, 2025, 12:35 p.m.