On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 10:42 AM Shaozhong SHI <shishaozhong@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Given 2 or more such columns, is there any measure that can be calculated to tell which one alternates more than others? Well, you could report non-flips as NULL and flips as magnitude, and then wrap that query in another query to compute whatever statistical properties you need... and you could have multiple columns so you're computing those numbers for each input column... I was mainly trying to point out the LAG() facility, which lets you compare a row with the preceding row, according to some sort order, which I think you'd want to build your query on top of. Hope that helps... postgres=# with flips as (select time, value, case when sign(lag(value) over (order by time)) != sign(value) then abs(lag(value) over (order by time) - value) end as flip_magnitude from time_series) select count(flip_magnitude) as num_flips, avg(flip_magnitude) as avg_magnitude from flips; count | avg -------+--------------------- 2 | 14.0000000000000000 (1 row)