MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu6.006 Introduction to AlgorithmsSpring 2008For information about citing these materials or our Terms of Use, visit: http://ocw.mit.edu/terms.Lecture 1 Introduction and Document Distance 6.006 Spring 2008 Lecture 1: Introduction and the Document Distance Problem Course Overview • Efficient procedures for solving problems on large inputs (Ex: entire works of Shake-speare, human genome, U.S. Highway map) • Scalability • Classic data structures and elementary algorithms (CLRS text) Real implementations in Python Fun problem sets! • ⇔ β version of the class - feedback is welcome! • Pre-requisites • Familiarity with Python and Discrete Mathematics Contents The course is divided into 7 modules - each of which has a motivating problem and problem set (except for the last module). Modules and motivating problems are as described below: 1. Linked Data Structures: Document Distance (DD) 2. Hashing: DD, Genome Comparison 3. Sorting: Gas Simulation 4. Search: Rubik’s Cube 2 × 2 × 2 5. Shortest Paths: Caltech MIT→ 6. Dynamic Programming: Stock Market 7. Numerics:√2 Document Distance Problem Motivation Given two documents, how similar are they? • Identical - easy? • Modified or related (Ex: DNA, Plagiarism, Authorship) 1� Lecture 1 Introduction and Document Distance 6.006 Spring 2008 • Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare’s plays? To answer the above, we need to define practical metrics. Metrics are defined in terms of word frequencies. Definitions 1. Word: Sequence of alphanumeric characters. For example, the phrase “6.006 is fun” has 4 words. 2. Word Frequencies: Word frequency D(w) of a given word w is the number of times it occurs in a document D. For example, the words and word frequencies for the above phrase are as below: Count : 1 0 1 1 0 1 W ord : 6 the is 006 easy fun In practice, while counting, it is easy to choose some canonical ordering of words. 3. Distance Metric: The document distance metric is the inner product of the vectors D1 and D2 containing the word frequencies for all words in the 2 documents. Equivalently, this is the projection of vectors D1 onto D2 or vice versa. Mathematically this is expressed as: D1 · D2 = D1(w) · D2(w) (1) w 4. Angle Metric: The angle between the vectors D1 and D2 gives an indication of overlap between the 2 documents. Mathematically this angle is expressed as: � � θ(D1, D2) = arccos D1 · D2 � D1 � ∗ � D2 � 0 ≤ θ ≤ π/2 An angle metric of 0 means the two documents are identical whereas an angle metric of π/2 implies that there are no common words. 5. Number of Words in Document: The magnitude of the vector D which contains word frequencies of all words in the document. Mathematically this is expressed as: N(D) =� D �= √D D (2)· So let’s apply the ideas to a few Python programs and try to flesh out more. 2Lecture 1 Introduction and Document Distance 6.006 Spring 2008 Document Distance in Practice Computing Document Distance: docdist1.py The python code and results relevant to this section are available here. This program com-putes the distance between 2 documents by performing the following steps: Read file • • Make word list [“the”,“year”,. . . ] • Count frequencies [[“the”,4012],[“year”,55],. . . ] • Sort into order [[“a”,3120],[“after”,17],. . . ] • Compute θ Ideally, we would like to run this program to compute document distances between writings of the following authors: Jules Verne - document size 25k • • Bobsey Twins - document size 268k Lewis and Clark - document size 1M • • Shakespeare - document size 5.5M Churchill - document size 10M • Experiment: Comparing the Bobsey and Lewis documents with docdist1.py gives θ = 0.574. However, it takes approximately 3 minutes to compute this document distance, and probably gets slower as the inputs get large. What is wrong with the efficiency of this program? Is it a Python vs. C issue? Is it a choice of algorithm issue - θ(n2) versus θ(n)? Profiling: docdist2.py In order to figure out why our initial program is so slow, we now “instrument” the program so that Python will tell us where the running time is going. This can be done simply using the profile module in Python. The profile module indicates how much time is spent in each routine. (See this link for details on profile). The profile module is imported into docdist1.py and the end of the docdist1.py file is modified. The modified docdist1.py file is renamed as docdist2.py Detailed results of document comparisons are available here 3 .Lecture 1 Introduction and Document Distance 6.006 Spring 2008 More on the different columns in the output displayed on that webpage: • tottime per call(column3) is tottime(column2)/ncalls(column1) • cumtime(column4)includes subroutine calls • cumtime per call(column5) is cumtime(column4)/ncalls(column1) The profiling of the Bobsey vs. Lewis document comparison is as follows: Total: 195 secs • Get words from line list: 107 secs • • Count-frequency: 44 secs • Get words from string: 13 secs Insertion sort: 12 secs • So the get words from line list operation is the culprit. The code for this particular section is: word_list = [ ] for line in L: words_in_line = get_words_from_string(line) word_list = word_list + words_in_line return word_list The bulk of the computation time is to implement word_list = word_list + words_in_line There isn’t anything else that takes up much computation time. List Concatenation: docdist3.py The problem in docdist1.py as illustrated by docdist2.py is that concatenating two lists takes time proportional to the sum of the lengths of the two lists, since each list is copied into the output list! L = L1 + L2 takes time proportional to L1 | + | L2 . If we had n lines (each with one | | n(n+1) 2)word), computation time would be proportional to 1 + 2 + 3 + . . . + n = 2 = θ(nSolution: word_list.extend (words_in_line) [word_list.append(word)] for each word in words_in_line Ensures L1.extend(L2) time proportional to | L2 | 4Lecture 1 Introduction and Document Distance 6.006 Spring 2008 Take Home Lesson: Python has powerful primitives (like concatenation of lists) built in. To write efficient algorithms, we need to understand their costs. See Python Cost
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