Peak finding (find_peaks) in SciPy - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Peak Finding in a Signal Using scipy

📖 Scenario: You have recorded a simple signal from a sensor over time. The signal has some peaks that represent important events. You want to find where these peaks occur.

🎯 Goal: Build a small program to find the peaks in a signal using the scipy.signal.find_peaks function.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list called signal with exact values representing the sensor data.

Create a variable called height_threshold to filter peaks by minimum height.

Use scipy.signal.find_peaks with the height parameter set to height_threshold to find peaks.

Print the indices of the peaks found.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Peak finding is used in many fields like analyzing heartbeats in medical data, detecting events in sensor data, or finding important points in stock price movements.

💼 Career

Data scientists and analysts often need to extract meaningful features from time series or signal data, and peak detection is a common technique for this.

1

Create the signal data

Create a list called signal with these exact values: [0, 2, 1, 3, 7, 1, 2, 6, 0, 1].

SciPy

# Create the signal list with the given values
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets to create a list and separate numbers with commas.

2

Set the height threshold for peaks

Create a variable called height_threshold and set it to 4 to filter peaks by minimum height.

SciPy

signal = [0, 2, 1, 3, 7, 1, 2, 6, 0, 1]
# Set the height_threshold variable to 4
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 4 to the variable height_threshold.

3

Find peaks using scipy.signal.find_peaks

Import find_peaks from scipy.signal. Use find_peaks on signal with the parameter height=height_threshold. Store the result indices in a variable called peaks.

SciPy

signal = [0, 2, 1, 3, 7, 1, 2, 6, 0, 1]
height_threshold = 4
# Import find_peaks and find peaks in signal with height_threshold
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use from scipy.signal import find_peaks to import. Then call find_peaks(signal, height=height_threshold) and unpack the first result as peaks.

4

Print the indices of the peaks

Print the variable peaks to display the indices of the peaks found in the signal.

SciPy

from scipy.signal import find_peaks

signal = [0, 2, 1, 3, 7, 1, 2, 6, 0, 1]
height_threshold = 4

peaks, _ = find_peaks(signal, height=height_threshold)
# Print the peaks variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(peaks) to show the peak indices.