KneeArrower

R package to find cutoff points on knee curves

Install

Open R, install the prerequisite signal package, then install this package from GitHub.

library(devtools)

install.packages("signal")
install_github("agentlans/KneeArrower")

Use

The following code shows example of finding knee points. More options are available. Please see package vignette for more details.

library(KneeArrower)

# Generate an example knee curve
x <- seq(0, 5, 0.05)
y <- log(1+x)

# Find the cutoff point.
# By default, it's the point at which the first derivative is half of maximum along the curve.
findCutoff(x, y)

# For more information on the options, view the help file for findCutoff
?findCutoff

Troubleshooting and Frequently Asked Questions

• Why doesn’t the output point look like a knee point?

Try plotting x and y coordinates on the same scale.

Also, if you’re using the first derivative cutoff method (default), you can adjust the slope to get a higher or lower point on the curve. Please see the vignettes for details.

• The output point doesn’t match the knee point I found using calculus!

The knee points given by the package are only approximate because the derivatives have to be estimated at every point from the data. However, the output should be very close to the actual point.

• What happens if there’s more than one knee point?

The package arbitrarily returns one of the knee points. The others won’t appear in the output.

• How come I can’t install vignettes?

devtools install doesn’t install vignettes by default. You may install vignettes by cloning this repository and building the package offline. Note: other packages may need to be installed first in order to build the vignettes.

Author, License

Copyright 2018, 2019, 2020 Alan Tseng

GNU General Public License v3