Python Reminders¶

I assume that you all know Python. A brief introduction to Python Basics can be found in this notebook from last year (ipynb, html). Here we will only review some useful concepts

List Comprehension¶

Recall the mathematical notation:

$$L_1 = \left\{x^2 : x \in \{0,1,\ldots ,9\}\right\}$$$$L_2 = \left(1, 2, 4, 8,\ldots, 2^{12}\right)$$
[0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81]
L1 = [0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81]
L2 = [1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096]

List comprehension with conditions

$$M = \left\{x \mid x \in L_1 \text{ if } x \text{ is even}\right\}$$
L3 = [0, 4, 16, 36, 64]

Nested use of link comprehension

[0, 4, 16, 36, 64]

Use of list comprehension for string processing

['The', 'quick', 'brown', 'fox', 'jumps', 'over', 'the', 'lazy', 'dog']
['THE', 'QUICK', 'BROWN', 'FOX', 'JUMPS', 'OVER', 'THE', 'LAZY', 'DOG']
[['THE', 'the'], ['QUICK', 'quick'], ['BROWN', 'brown'], ['FOX', 'fox'], ['JUMPS', 'jumps'], ['OVER', 'over'], ['THE', 'the'], ['LAZY', 'lazy'], ['DOG', 'dog']]
['quick', 'brown', 'jumps', 'over', 'lazy']

Use list comprehension for obtaining input

Give numbers separated by comma: 1,2,3,7
[1, 2, 3, 7]

Creating vectors and matrices

Create a vector of 10 zeros

[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]

Create a 10x10 matrix with all 0s¶

[[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]]

Set the diagonal to 1

[[1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0],
 [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1]]

Create a list of 10 random integers in [0,99]

[63, 65, 41, 9, 4, 3, 54, 79, 41, 90]

Removing elements from a list

Removing elements from a list while you iterate through it can lead to problems...

[1, 4, 5, 8]

Another way to do this using list comprehension:

We can create a new list with the entries we want to keep

Or create a list with the entries we want to remove

[1, 5]

Using a dictionary in the list comprehension

['B', 'C']

Dicitonary Comprehension¶

We can create dictionaries in a similar way as with list comprehension

{'1': 1, '2': 2, '3': 3, '4': 4, '5': 5}
{'apple': 5, 'mango': 5, 'banana': 6, 'cherry': 6}
{'Apple': 0, 'Mango': 1, 'Banana': 2, 'Cherry': 3}
{0: 'Apple', 1: 'Mango', 2: 'Banana', 3: 'Cherry'}
{0: 'Apple', 1: 'Mango', 2: 'Banana', 3: 'Cherry'}

Using the right data structure¶

Using the right data structure makes a big difference when handling large data. Dictionaries and sets have expected constant time for finding an element, while lists have linear complexity. Even logarithmic time is significantly faster than linear.

Example

Looking for 100K integers in a collection of 100K integers

0.020679712295532227
111.83691191673279

Example

You are given a graph in the form of a collection of edges, that is, pairs of vertices

How do you store it in order to be able to quickly answer if there is an edge (x,y) in the graph, and also to get all the neighbors of node?

Create a dictionary with nodes as the keys, and sets with neighboring nodes as values

{1: {2},
 2: {1, 3, 5, 6, 7},
 3: {2, 4, 5},
 5: {2, 3, 6, 7},
 6: {2, 5},
 7: {2, 5, 8},
 4: {3},
 8: {7, 9, 10},
 9: {8},
 10: {8}}
{1, 3, 5, 6, 7}

The Random library¶

We will often need to work with randomness. A library for this that is part of the main Python distribution is the random library.

Useful functions:

  1. seed: Allows you to repeat the same random choices in different experiments
  2. random: produces a random real number between 0 and 1
  3. randint: select int for a range
  4. choice: select an element from a list
  5. choices: select k elements form a list with replacement. It is possible to use weights
  6. shuffle: suffle a list of elements
  7. sample: sample k elements from a list

Example¶

How do I implement the following?

With probability 0.7 print 'A', with probability 0.2 print 'B', and with probability 0.1 do nothing.

A

Example¶

From a list I want to sample k elements where k is a parameter. I want my samples for the different k's to have the property that smaller samples are subsets of bigger samples. That is, the sample of size k+1 will contain one more random element to the sample of size k.

[5, 4, 13, 2]
[5, 4, 13, 2, 6]