Re: data resampling

Dear Juan,

you've had a lot of good input already on the important differences between downsample and resample from other colleagues. The only thing I would like to add is that you need to think about these things in the context of what sort of data you are dealing with, why you are downsampling in the first place, whether or why 1 Hz is really a good new sample rate for your data, etc. Clearly your original trace has a lot of "fine structure" at high frequencies, faster than 1 Hz. Saying you want to downsample implies, either that you think this high frequency stuff is noise, or that it may be signal but there are other reasons why you need to sacrifice some of that detail. The resample() function mentioned by Alain works pretty well if low pass filtering at the new "Nyquist frequency" (in your case 0.5 Hz) is a good way to analyse your data. But there may be good reasons to filter at even lower frequencies (and after you've done that you could use downsample() without having to worry about aliassing). Or you may decide that there is "real signal" at or above 0.5 Hz, in which case you should not downsample to 1 Hz in the first place. What I'm really saying is that, to do the best quality work, you should filter your signal first, before you do any downsampling, and think carefully about the most appropriate filtering which will give you the best "signal to noise", and what these filters imply for what sort of downsampling can be done in a lossless manner. If that's too much work, then using the decimate() function Alain mentioned is the next best thing.

Cheers,

Jan

On 14 August 2014 00:05, Juan Wu <wujuan22@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

List experts,

I am attempting to down sample my data from 300 Hz to 1 Hz. I just tried two functions of Matlab: 1) a = resample(Data,1,300); 2) b = downsample(Data,300). The results are quite different between each others.

Apparently, the result from "downsampled" is close to the the original data. However, quite a few persons suggested using the re-sampling method - I get this information from google searching, and very agree with this view. Personally I think the downsample method is too simple and very arbitrary. I also do not believe the "Nearest Neighbor" method. I assume that the method resampling takes both "FIR interpolator and decimator" implementation - this is what I expected. Am I right? But now my output from the re-sampling method is really very terrible. So I assume that the resample function from Matlab does not do a good job for this. I am not sure whether I need change to use other softwares or try other functions in the Matlab.

Any opinions or references are much appreciated.
J

--
Prof Jan Schnupp
University of Oxford
Dept. of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics
Sherrington Building - Parks Road
Oxford OX1 3PT - UK
+44-1865-282012
http://jan.schnupp.net