Storing results in a recursive function/ BST - recursion

I'm writing a bst function that would store all the keys within a given range as a String:
String rangeToString(TreeNode root,int low, int high, String result){
if(root==null) return "";
if(root.key>low)) rangeToString(root.leftChild, low, high,result);
if(root.key>=low && root.key.<=high) result+=root.key;
if(root.key<high) rangeToString(root.rightChild,low,high,result);
return result;
}
I'm basically doing an inorder traversal, adding values to the string when they're in range.
At the moment it returns a string that only contains the root key.
I know the problem is in my return statements, but I just can't seem to get how to implement the function without them.
Can anyone point me in the right direction please?

you can pass into your arguments a supplentary "accumulated up to now" list of strings (say you name it curlist). then when you return you return this curlist argument + .Add(your found key for this recursion level) and in the places you recursively call the fonction (rangeToString) you concatenate the result to the current list curlist (using Append or whatever).
pseudo code:
list<string> myRecursiveFunc(some args, list<string> curlist)
{
if (recursConditionOK)
curlist = curlist.Append(myRecusriveFunc, curlist);
return curlist;
}

First, you probably want to include a return on your recursion calls, since you are returning the results of your recursions:
String rangeToString(TreeNode root,int low, int high, String result){
if(root==null) return "";
if(root.key>low)) return rangeToString(root.leftChild, low, high,result);
if(root.key>=low && root.key.<=high) result+=root.key;
if(root.key<high) return rangeToString(root.rightChild,low,high,result);
return result;
}
I am suspicious of your conditions, so I would spend some time examining those... In fact, the return on the recursions are making an assumption about the structure of your conditions.
Also, one way of gathering parameters that's pretty intuitive is to use tail recursion and accumulate your results in your parameters.
You can read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_call
The key is that you are using your parameters themselves to gather the results, and when your function is done, you return your parameters (the ones that accumulate the results).

Related

TryGetInt32 throws System.InvalidOperationException

Call me crazy, but I was under the impression that there was a convention of try which meant give it a go, but if you can't then get back to me and let me know that it was a "no-go".
I have recently started a new project and I have decided to use System.Text.Json instead of Newtonsoft since it has been out for a while now and I like to play with new things.
I have the following bit of code in a JsonConverter:
using (var jsonDoc = JsonDocument.ParseValue(ref reader))
{
if (jsonDoc.RootElement.TryGetInt32(out int number))
{
}
}
When it is a number, it works awesomely, but when it is anything but a number, it throws as if I was calling GetInt32().
In the custom converter, I sometimes get a number back, but I also can get an object back which contains the number that I am expecting as well as a string. I thought that I would be able to test for this using the TryGetInt32 method.
I have two questions:
How could I test if I am getting the number back, or getting the number AND the string?, and
What is the difference between TryGetInt32(out int number) and GetInt32()?
TryGetInt32 throws exception if the value is not a number type.
It does not throw and returns false if the value is a number type but not a number kind convertible to int32.
I hope the following additional check helps:
using (var jsonDoc = JsonDocument.ParseValue(ref reader))
{
if(jsonDoc.RootElement.ValueKind == JsonValueKind.Number &&
jsonDoc.RootElement.TryGetInt32(out int number))
{
}
}
first question :
using int.TryParse(variable,result) : this return bool and store variable if integer in result
example:
string json = "5";
int result;
if (int.TryParse(json, out result))
{
Console.WriteLine(result);
}
second question:
TryGetInt32(Int32) :Attempts to represent the current JSON number as an Int32 and return bool .
Getint32(): get specific value as int32 in this case you must be sure that the value is integer

In functional programming, is "saving the state" of an algorithm at the recursive function argument cheating?

for instance, lets suppose we had to write an algorithm to get the max value of an array of integers, could we still call the code functional if we make the recursive function return various information that simulates an assignment to a global object? an exemple:
function getMax(array, props={}) {
const {index = 0, actualMax = array[0]}= props ///initial props
const arrayNotEnded = array[index + 1] !== undefined
if (arrayNotEnded) {
const maxOf= (a, b) => a > b ? a : b
const newMax = maxOf(actualMax, array[index+1])
const nextIndex = index+1
return getMax(array, {index:nextIndex, actualMax:newMax} )
}else return actualMax
}
a funny thing about that is, in Haskell, we cannot have optional arguments, so this logic would not be something cool to work with, since we would have to pass the initial props every time we would need to call this function.
Yes, you could consider it cheating, but this is a well-known technique in functional programming, the accumulator argument [1][2][3]. Remember: code doesn't become functional by not having state, functional programming is all about making state explicit. There's no better way of doing that than by making it a parameter of your function.
Your code has some other problems, though. Most prominently, the state should be internal to your function, only being passed to a helper function (that might be locally declared or separate) but not as part of your function's public interface. This also prevents confusing your helper function by passing invalid state (e.g. out-of-bound indices). And yes, also the optional parameter smells - not because you think this is not possible in Haskell (it is, using Maybe), but because it can be forgotten or passed mistakenly. Instead, the helper function should have a required state parameter, and getMax should have none.
Last but not least, you should avoid out-of-bounds indexed access on arrays - check the length to know where the end is, don't compare to undefined. This includes unconditionally accessing array[0] - that makes it very easy to overlook that your function can return undefined. Make this error condition explicit as well.
Here's how I'd write it:
function getMax(array) {
if (!array.length)
throw new Error("array must be non-empty");
else
return maxFrom(1, array[0]);
function maxFrom(index, max) {
if (index < array.length)
return maxFrom(index+1, array[index] > max ? array[index] : max);
else
return actualMax
}
}
Even better than throwing exceptions would be if you'd had an algebraic data type at hand that you could return to represent the error-or-result.

java 8: How to convert following code to functional?

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.
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”.
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.

How to filter empty groups from a reduction?

It appears to me that Crossfilter never excludes a group from the results of a reduction, even if the applied filters have excluded all the rows in that group. Groups that have had all of their rows filtered out simply return an aggregate value of 0 (or whatever reduceInitial returns).
The problem with this is that it makes it impossible to distinguish between groups that contain no rows and groups that do contain rows but just legitimately aggregate to a value of 0. Basically, there's no way (that I can see) to distinguish between a null value and a 0 aggregation.
Does anybody know of a built-in Crossfilter technique for achieving this? I did come up with a way to do this with my own custom reduceInitial/reduceAdd/reduceRemove method but it wasn't totally straight forward and it seemed to me that this is behavior that might/should be more native to Crossfilter's filtering semantics. So I'm wondering if there's a canonical way to achieve this.
I'll post my technique as an answer if it turns out that there is no built-in way to do this.
A simple way to accomplish this is to have both count and total be reduce attributes:
var dimGroup = dim.group().reduce(reduceAdd, reduceRemove, reduceInitial);
function reduceAdd(p, v) {
++p.count;
p.total += v.value;
return p;
}
function reduceRemove(p, v) {
--p.count;
p.total -= v.value;
return p;
}
function reduceInitial() {
return {count: 0, total: 0};
}
Empty groups will have zero counts, so retrieving only non-empty groups is easy:
dimGroup.top(Infinity).filter(function(d) { return d.value.count > 0; });
OK, there doesn't seem to be any obvious answer jumping out so I'll answer my own question and post the technique I used to solve this.
This example assumes that I've already created a dimension and grouping, which is passed in as groupDim. Because I want to be able to sum up any arbitrary numeric field, I also pass in fieldName so that it will be available in the closure scope of my the reduction functions.
One important characteristic of this technique is that it relies on there being a way to uniquely identify which group each row belongs to. Thinking in term of OLAP, this is essentially the "tuple" that defines a particular aggregation context. But it can be anything you want as long as it deterministically returns the same value for all data rows belonging to a given group.
The end result is that empty groups will have an aggregate value of "null" which can be easily detected for and filtered out after the fact. Any group with at least one row will have a numeric value (even if it happens to be zero).
Refinements or suggestions to this are more then welcome. Here's the code with comments inline:
function configureAggregateSum(groupDim, fieldName) {
function getGroupKey(datum) {
// Given datum return key corresponding to the group to which the datum belongs
}
// This object will keep track of the number of times each group had reduceAdd
// versus reduceRemove called. It is used to revert the running aggregate value
// back to "null" if the count hits zero. This is unfortunately necessary because
// Crossfilter filters as it is aggregating so reduceAdd can be called even if, in
// the end, all records in a group end up being filtered out.
//
var groupCount = {};
function reduceAdd(p, v) {
// Here's the code that keeps track of the invocation count per group
var groupKey = getGroupKey(v);
if (groupCount[groupKey] === undefined) { groupCount[groupKey] = 0; }
groupCount[groupKey]++;
// And here's the implementation of the add reduction (sum in my case)
// Note the check for null (our initial value)
var value = +v[fieldName];
return p === null ? value : p + value;
}
function reduceRemove(p, v) {
// This code keeps track of invocations of invocation count per group and, importantly,
// reverts value back to "null" if it hits 0 for the group. Essentially, if we detect
// that group has no records again we revert to the initial value.
var groupKey = getGroupKey(v);
groupCount[groupKey]--;
if (groupCount[groupKey] === 0) {
return null;
}
// And here's the code for the remove reduction (sum in my case)
var value = +v[fieldName];
return p - value;
}
function reduceInitial() {
return null;
}
// Once returned, can invoke all() or top() to get the values, which can then be filtered
// using a native Array.filter to remove the groups with null value.
return groupedDim.reduce(reduceAdd, reduceRemove, reduceInitial);
}

Backtracking recursively with multiple solutions

function BACKTRACKING-SEARCH(csp) returns a solution, or failure
return RECURSIVE- BACKTRACKING({ }, csp)
function RECURSIVE-BACKTRACKING(assignment,csp) returns a solution, or failure
if assignment is complete then
return assignment
var ←SELECT-UNASSIGNED-VARIABLE(VARIABLES[csp],assignment,csp)
for each value in ORDER-DOMAIN-VALUES(var,assignment,csp) do
if value is consistent with assignment according to CONSTRAINTS[csp] then
add {var = value} to assignment
result ← RECURSIVE-BACKTRACKING(assignment, csp)
if result ̸= failure then
return result
remove {var = value} from assignment
return failure
This is a backtracking recursion algorythm pseudocode from AIMA. However, I don't understand if it returns ALL possible solutions or just first one found. In case it is the last option, could you please help me modify it to return a list of possible solutions instead (or at least updating some global list).
EDIT: I implemented this algorithm in Java. However, there is one problem:
if I don't return assignment, but save it in result instead, the recursion stop condition fails (i.e. it doesn't exist anymore). How can I implement another stop-condition? Maybe I should return true in the end?
Here is my code :
/**
* The actual backtracking. Unfortunately, I don't have time to implement LCV or MCV,
* therefore it will be just ordinary variable-by-variable search.
* #param line
* #param onePossibleSituation
* #param result
*/
public static boolean recursiveBacktrack(Line line, ArrayList<Integer> onePossibleSituation, ArrayList<ArrayList<Integer>> result){
if (onePossibleSituation.size() == line.getNumOfVars()){
// instead of return(assignment)
ArrayList<Integer> situationCopy = new ArrayList<Integer>();
situationCopy.addAll(onePossibleSituation);
result.add(situationCopy);
onePossibleSituation.clear();
}
Block variableToAssign = null;
// iterate through all variables and choose one unassigned
for(int i = 0; i < line.getNumOfVars(); i++){
if(!line.getCspMiniTaskVariables().get(i).isAssigned()){
variableToAssign = line.getCspMiniTaskVariables().get(i);
break;
}
}
// for each domain value for given block
for (int i = line.getCspMiniTaskDomains().get(variableToAssign.getID())[0];
i <= line.getCspMiniTaskDomains().get(variableToAssign.getID())[0]; i++){
if(!areThereConflicts(line, onePossibleSituation)){
//complete the assignment
variableToAssign.setStartPositionTemporary(i);
variableToAssign.setAssigned(true);
onePossibleSituation.add(i);
//do backtracking
boolean isPossibleToPlaceIt = recursiveBacktrack(line,onePossibleSituation,result);
if(!isPossibleToPlaceIt){
return(false);
}
}
// unassign
variableToAssign.setStartPositionTemporary(-1);
variableToAssign.setAssigned(false);
onePossibleSituation.remove(i);
}
// end of backtracking
return(false);
}
This code checks if solution found and if it is, returns the solution. Otherwise, continue backtracking. That means, it returns the first solution found.
if result ̸= failure then
return result
remove {var = value} from assignment
You can modify it like that:
if result ̸= failure then
PRINT result // do not return, just save the result
remove {var = value} from assignment
Or, better, modify this part:
if assignment is complete then
print assignment
return assignment // print it and return
About edited question:
First, return true in the first if, so recursion will know that it found a solution. The second step, there is a mistake, probably:
if(!isPossibleToPlaceIt){
return(false);
}
Should be
if(isPossibleToPlaceIt){
return(true);
}
Because if your backtracking has found something, it returns true, which means you don't have to check anything else any longer.
EDIT#2: If you want to continue backtracking to find ALL solutions, just remove the whole previous if section with return:
//if(isPossibleToPlaceIt){
// return(true);
//}
So we will continue the search in any way.

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