STD-Stepped Fast Cosine Transform Moving Average [Loxx]

11. Aug. 2022

STD-Stepped Fast Cosine Transform Moving Average [Loxx] is an experimental moving average that uses Fast Cosine Transform to calculate a moving average. This indicator has standard deviation stepping in order to smooth the trend by weeding out low volatility movements.

What is the Discrete Cosine Transform?
A discrete cosine transform (DCT) expresses a finite sequence of data points in terms of a sum of cosine functions oscillating at different frequencies. The DCT, first proposed by Nasir Ahmed in 1972, is a widely used transformation technique in signal processing and data compression. It is used in most digital media, including digital images (such as JPEG and HEIF, where small high-frequency components can be discarded), digital video (such as MPEG and H.26x), digital audio (such as Dolby Digital, MP3 and AAC), digital television (such as SDTV, HDTV and VOD), digital radio (such as AAC+ and DAB+), and speech coding (such as AAC-LD, Siren and Opus). DCTs are also important to numerous other applications in science and engineering, such as digital signal processing, telecommunication devices, reducing network bandwidth usage, and spectral methods for the numerical solution of partial differential equations.

The use of cosine rather than sine functions is critical for compression, since it turns out (as described below) that fewer cosine functions are needed to approximate a typical signal, whereas for differential equations the cosines express a particular choice of boundary conditions. In particular, a DCT is a Fourier-related transform similar to the discrete Fourier transform (DFT), but using only real numbers. The DCTs are generally related to Fourier Series coefficients of a periodically and symmetrically extended sequence whereas DFTs are related to Fourier Series coefficients of only periodically extended sequences. DCTs are equivalent to DFTs of roughly twice the length, operating on real data with even symmetry (since the Fourier transform of a real and even function is real and even), whereas in some variants the input and/or output data are shifted by half a sample. There are eight standard DCT variants, of which four are common.

The most common variant of discrete cosine transform is the type-II DCT, which is often called simply "the DCT". This was the original DCT as first proposed by Ahmed. Its inverse, the type-III DCT, is correspondingly often called simply "the inverse DCT" or "the IDCT". Two related transforms are the discrete sine transform (DST), which is equivalent to a DFT of real and odd functions, and the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT), which is based on a DCT of overlapping data. Multidimensional DCTs (MD DCTs) are developed to extend the concept of DCT to MD signals. There are several algorithms to compute MD DCT. A variety of fast algorithms have been developed to reduce the computational complexity of implementing DCT. One of these is the integer DCT[1] (IntDCT), an integer approximation of the standard DCT,[2]: ix, xiii, 1, 141–304  used in several ISO/IEC and ITU-T international standards.

Notable settings

• windowper = period for calculation, restricted to powers of 2: "16", "32", "64", "128", "256", "512", "1024", "2048", this reason for this is FFT is an algorithm that computes DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform) in a fast way, generally in 𝑂(𝑁⋅log2(𝑁)) instead of 𝑂(𝑁2). To achieve this the input matrix has to be a power of 2 but many FFT algorithm can handle any size of input since the matrix can be zero-padded. For our purposes here, we stick to powers of 2 to keep this fast and neat. read more about this here: Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm
• smthper = smoothing count, this smoothing happens after the first FCT regular pass. this zeros out frequencies from the previously calculated values above SS count. the lower this number, the smoother the output, it works opposite from other smoothing periods
  

Included

• Alerts
  
• Signals
  
• Loxx's Expanded Source Types
  

Additional reading
A Fast Computational Algorithm for the Discrete Cosine Transform by Chen et al.

Practical Fast 1-D DCT Algorithms With 11 Multiplications by Loeffler et al.

Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm