java 8: How to convert following code to functional? - functional-programming

Question

Instead of using the for loop, how do I use the Stream API of Java 8 on array of booleans? How do I use methods such as forEach, reduce etc.?
I want to get rid of the two variables totalRelevant and retrieved which I am using to maintain state.
As in a lambda expression, we can only reference final variables from its lexical context.
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.List;
public class IRLab {
public static void main(String[] args) {
// predefined list of either document is relevant or not
List<Boolean> documentRelivency = Arrays.asList(true, false, true, true, false);
System.out.println("Precision\tRecall\tF-Measure");
// variables for output
double totalRelevant = 0.0;
double retrieved = 0.0;
for (int i = 0; i < documentRelivency.size(); ++i) {
Boolean isRelevant = documentRelivency.get(i);
// check if document is relevant
if (isRelevant) totalRelevant += 1;
// total number of retrieved documents will be equal to
// number of document being processed currently, i.e. retrieved = i + 1
retrieved += 1;
// storing values using formulas
double precision = totalRelevant / retrieved;
double recall = totalRelevant / totalRelevant;
double fmeasure = (2 * precision * recall) / (precision + recall);
// Printing the final calculated values
System.out.format("%9.2f\t%.2f\t%.2f\t\n", precision, recall, fmeasure);
}
}
}
How do I convert above code to functional code using the Java 8 Stream API and Lambda Expressions? I need to maintain state for two variables as above.

Answer 1

Generally, converting imperative to a functional code will only be an improvement when you manage to get rid of mutable state that causes the processing of one element to depend on the processing of the previous one.
There are workarounds that allow you to incorporate mutable state, but you should first try to find a different representation of your problem that works without. In your example, the processing of each element depends on two values, totalRelevant and retrieved. The latter is just an ascending number and therefore can be represented as a range, e.g. IntStream.range(startValue, endValue). The second stems from your list of boolean values and is the number of true value inside the sublist (0, retrieved)(inclusive).
You could recalculate that value without needing the previous value, but reiterating the list in each step could turn out to be expensive. So instead, collect your list into a single int number representing a bitset first, i.e. [true, false, true, true, false] becomes 0b_10110. Then, you can get the number of one bits using intrinsic operations:
List<Boolean> documentRelivency = Arrays.asList(true, false, true, true, false);
int numBits=documentRelivency.size(), bitset=IntStream.range(0, numBits)
.map(i -> documentRelivency.get(i)? 1<<(numBits-i-1): 0).reduce(0, (i,j) -> i|j);
System.out.println("Precision\tRecall\tF-Measure");
IntStream.rangeClosed(1, numBits)
.mapToObj(retrieved -> {
double totalRelevant = Integer.bitCount(bitset&(-1<<(numBits-retrieved)));
return String.format("%9.2f\t%.2f\t%.2f",
totalRelevant/retrieved, 1f, 2/(1+retrieved/totalRelevant));
})
.forEach(System.out::println);
This way, you have expressed the entire operation in a functional way where the processing of one element does not depend on the previous one. It could even run in parallel, though this would offer no benefit here.
If the list size exceeds 32, you have to resort to long, or java.util.BitSet for more than 64.
But the whole operation is more an example of how to change the thinking from “this is a number I increment in each iteration” to “I’m processing a continuous range of values” and from “this is a number I increment when the element is true” to “this is the count of true values in a range of this list”.

Answer 2

It's unclear why you need to change your code to lambdas. Currently it's quite short and lambdas will not make it shorter or cleaner. However if you really want, you may encapsulate your shared state in the separate object:
static class Stats {
private int totalRelevant, retrieved;
public void add(boolean relevant) {
if(relevant)
totalRelevant++;
retrieved++;
}
public double getPrecision() {
return ((double)totalRelevant) / retrieved;
}
public double getRecall() {
return 1.0; // ??? was totalRelevant/totalRelevant in original code
}
public double getFMeasure() {
double precision = getPrecision();
double recall = getRecall();
return (2 * precision * recall) / (precision + recall);
}
}
And use with lambda like this:
Stats stats = new Stats();
documentRelivency.forEach(relevant -> {
stats.add(relevant);
System.out.format("%9.2f\t%.2f\t%.2f\t\n", stats.getPrecision(),
stats.getRecall(), stats.getFMeasure());
});
Lambda is here, but not Stream API. Seems that involving Stream API for such problem is not very good idea as you need to output the intermediate states of mutable container which should be mutated strictly in given order. Well, if you desperately need Stream API, replace .forEach with .stream().forEachOrdered.