Given a set of coordinates corresponding to a closed shape, I want to calculate the total absolute curvature, which requires calculating the curvature for each point, taking the absolute value, and summing them. Simple enough.
I used the answer to this question to calculate the curvature from a matrix of x y coordinates (xymat) and get what I thought would be the total absolute curvature:
sum(abs(predict(smooth.spline(xymat), deriv = 2)$y))
The problem is that total absolute curvature has a minimum value of 2*pi and is exactly that for circles, but this code is evaluating to values less than 2*pi:
library(purrr)
xymat <- map_df(data.frame(degrees=seq(0:360)),
function(theta) data.frame(x = sin(theta), y = cos(theta)))
sum(abs(predict(smooth.spline(xymat), deriv = 2)$y))
This returns 1.311098 instead of the expected value of 6.283185.
If I change the df parameter of smooth.spline to 3 as in the previous answer, the returned value is 3.944053, still shy of 2*pi (the df value smooth.spline calculated for itself was 2.472213).
Is there a better way to calculate curvature? Is smooth.spline parameterized by arc length or will incorporating it (somehow) rescue this calculation?
Okay, a few things before we begin. You're using degrees in your seq, which will give you incorrect results (0 to 360 degrees). You can check that this is wrong by taking cos(360) in R, which isn't 1. This is explained in the documentation for the trig functions under Details.
So let's change your function to this
xymat <- map_df(data.frame(degrees=seq(0,2*pi,length=360)),
function(theta) data.frame(x = sin(theta), y = cos(theta)))
If you plot this, this indeed looks like a circle.
Let's actually restrict this to the lower half of the circle. If you put a spline through this without understanding the symmetry and looking at the plot, chances are that you'll get a horizontal line through the circle.
Why? because the spline doesn't know that it's symmetric above and below y = 0. The spline is trying to fit a function that explains the "data", not trace an arc. It splits the difference between two symmetric sets of points around y = 0.
If we restrict the spline to the lower half of the circle, we can use y values between 1 and -1, like this:
lower.semicircle <- data.frame(predict(smooth.spline(xymat[91:270,], all.knots = T)))
And let's fit a spline through it.
lower.semicircle.pred<-data.frame(predict(smooth.spline(lower.semicircle, all.knots = T)))
Note that I'm not using the deriv function here. That is for a different problem in the cars example to which you linked. You want total absolute curvature and they are looking at rate of change of curvature.
What we have now is an approximation to a lower semicircle using splines. Now you want the distance between all of the little sequential points like in the integral from the wikipedia page.
Let's calculate all of the little arc distances using a distance matrix. This literally calculates the Euclidean distances between each point to every other point.
all.pairwise.distances.in.the.spline.approx<-dist(lower.semicircle.pred, diag=F)
dist.matrix<-as.matrix(all.pairwise.distances.in.the.spline.approx)
seq.of.distances.you.want<-dist.matrix[row(dist.matrix) == col(dist.matrix) + 1]
This last object is what you need to sum across.
sum(seq.of.distances.you.want)
..which evaluates to [1] 3.079 for the lower semicircle, around half of your 2*pi expected value.
It's not perfect but splines have problems with edge effects.