Computing Variable using SYSMIS - spss

I'm running into a problem that I've never encountered before and I cannot quite figure out what's going on.
I am trying to compute a variable as follows:
COMPUTE A=$SYSMIS.
IF B=$SYSMIS A=$SYSMIS.
IF C > SUM(B, 1) A= 1.
IF C = SUM(B, 1) A= 2.
IF C = B A= 2.
IF C < B A=3.
This runs fine except for the fact that when B=$SYSMIS there are very clear examples of A that are not in fact missing.
I tested it using:
TEMP.
SELECT IF B=$SYSMIS.
FREQ A.
It tells me that "No cases were input to this procedure. Either there are none in the working data file or all of them have been filtered out."
Meaning, the code worked correctly.
But...I found over 1,000 cases that are not fitting this logic.
TEMP.
SELECT IF ID=102.
FREQ A B.
This shows a specific ID that has A=$SYSMIS and B=2.
A, B and C are all numeric.
Thanks in advance for any insight! (:

First, instead of IF B=$SYSMIS you should use if missing(B) - for computing, for analysis and for select.
Another probable reason for your results is in commands like this:
IF C > SUM(B, 1) A=1.
If B is missing, the result of SUM(B, 1) is 1. Therefore if C>1 A gets the value 1, in spite of B being missing.
There are two ways to overcome this.
First, using X+Y instead of sum(X,Y) will result in a missing value when X or Y is missing:
IF C > (B + 1) A=1.
Second option: put the command COMPUTE A=$SYSMIS. at the end of the syntax instead of the beginning, so any values entered in A when B is missing will be replaced with a missing value.

Related

Logical conditions with missing values

I'm using Transform > Compute Variable to OR two variables (B,C) together. My two vars can have values 1, 2, or 3. I want to calculate a third var that's 1 if either B or C is 1 and zero otherwise. This works
A = (B=1) | (C=1)
But I'm running into trouble if B or C is missing. What I'd like is
if B and C exist and B or C equals 1, A = 1
if B and C exist and neither equals 1, A = 0
if B is missing and C is missing, A = missing
if B or C is 1 and the other value is missing, A = 1
if B or C is not 1 and the other value is missing, A = 0
Can I use Transform > Compute Variable to accomplish this or do I need another approach?
Here's a one liner for this:
compute A=max((B=1), (C=1)).
exe.
You can do this through the transformation menus, but I recommend getting used to (the power of) using syntax.
You can write this in the syntax window. If variable exists is translated as if ~miss(variable)
if ~miss(B) and ~miss(C) and any(1,B,C) A=1.
if ~miss(B) and ~miss(C) and ~any(1,B,C) A=0.
if miss(B) and miss(C) A=$sysmis.
if miss(B) or miss(C) and any(1,B,C) A=1.
if miss(B) or miss(C) and ~any(1,B,C) A=0.
EXECUTE.
Or, if I understand correctly what you are trying to do:
Compute A=0.
if any(1,B,C) A=1.
if miss(A) and miss(B) A=$sysmis.
EXECUTE.

proof of optimality in activity selection

Can someone please explain in a not so formal way how the greedy choice is the optimal solution for the activity selection problem? This is the simplest explanation that I have found but I don't really get it
How does Greedy Choice work for Activities sorted according to finish time?
Let the given set of activities be S = {1, 2, 3, ..n} and activities be sorted by finish time. The greedy choice is to always pick activity 1. How come the activity 1 always provides one of the optimal solutions. We can prove it by showing that if there is another solution B with the first activity other than 1, then there is also a solution A of the same size with activity 1 as the first activity. Let the first activity selected by B be k, then there always exist A = {B – {k}} U {1}.(Note that the activities in B are independent and k has smallest finishing time among all. Since k is not 1, finish(k) >= finish(1)).
The following is my understanding of why greedy solution always words:
Assertion: If A is the greedy choice(starting with 1st activity in the sorted array), then it gives the optimal solution.
Proof: Let there be another choice B starting with some activity k (k != 1 or finishTime(k)>= finishTime(1)) which alone gives the optimal solution.So, B does not have the 1st activity and the following relation could be written between A & B could be written as:
A = {B - {k}} U {1}
Here:
1.Sets A and B are disjoint
2.Both A and B have compatible activities in them
Since we conclude that |A|=|B|, therefore activity A also gives the optimal solution.
Let's say A is a the optimal solution which starts with 1 if the intervals are S={1,2,3,.....m} and the length of the solution is say n1. If A is not an optimal solution, then there exists another solution B which starts with k!=1 and finishTime(k)>=finishTime(1), which has length n2.
So, n2>n1.
Now, if we exclude k from solution B then we are left with n2-1 number of elements.
Since, k doesn't overlap with other intervals in B, 1 will also not overlap.
This is because all intervals in B(excluding k) will have startTime>= finishTime(k)>=finishTime(1).Hence, if we replace k with 1 in B, we still have n2 length. But optimal solution starting with 1 was A with length n1. We are getting n1=n2 , which contradicts n2>n1. Hence Solution starting with 1 is optimal.

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Wrong number of attributes in the string + Mahout

I am trying to create a file descriptor using the command:
$ MAHOUT_HOME/core/target/mahout-core--job.jar org.apache.mahout.classifier.df.tools.Describe -p testdata/KDDTrain+.arff -f testdata/KDDTrain+.info -d N 3 C 2 N C 4 N C 8 N 2 C 19 N L
from the link:
https://mahout.apache.org/users/classification/partial-implementation.html on my data file but whatever file I take and change the number of attributes string N 3 C 2 N C 4 N C 8 N 2 C 19 N L .
I get the following exception:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Wrong number of attributes in the string
Please help!
There are a couple of reasons for which you might get an error like that...
Wrong Descriptor: Putting this for a sake of completeness. You must have already checked this one out. You have actually given a wrong descriptor for the data. Re-check the number and type of columns and then give them correctly to the descriptor.
Bad separator: Re-check the delimiter used in the data. That also might create some trouble. May be the data you have has some wrongly placed delimiter in some records. Make sure of that.
Special Characters: In my few experiments, I have noticed mahout does not enjoy if there are certain special characters, or data consists of characters of language other than English (unless of course, you tweak around the code). So make sure you have a way of handling them, and you should be good to go.
Anyways all these fight just so you can create a descriptor of the data. ATB.
Old question, but I had a more acute answer that I discovered after landing here with the same problem.
In this particular case, the problem I found was that the format of data file (from http://nsl.cs.unb.ca/NSL-KDD/) seems to have changed from the example as listed on the Mahout Random Forest example page.
The example lists a line format with the specifier
N 3 C 2 N C 4 N C 8 N 2 C 19 N L
but there's an extra element at the end of the lines; for example:
13,tcp,telnet,SF,118,2425,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.00,0.00,0.00,26,10,0.38,0.12,0.04,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.12,0.30,guess_passwd,2
which has one more field. Adding another number field (N) to the end of the specifier, as
N 3 C 2 N C 4 N C 8 N 2 C 19 N L N
I had luck using just the plain .txt file format instead of the .arff file format.

Pathfinding in Prolog

I'm trying to teach myself Prolog. Below, I've written some code that I think should return all paths between nodes in an undirected graph... but it doesn't. I'm trying to understand why this particular code doesn't work (which I think differentiates this question from similar Prolog pathfinding posts). I'm running this in SWI-Prolog. Any clues?
% Define a directed graph (nodes may or may not be "room"s; edges are encoded by "leads_to" predicates).
room(kitchen).
room(living_room).
room(den).
room(stairs).
room(hall).
room(bathroom).
room(bedroom1).
room(bedroom2).
room(bedroom3).
room(studio).
leads_to(kitchen, living_room).
leads_to(living_room, stairs).
leads_to(living_room, den).
leads_to(stairs, hall).
leads_to(hall, bedroom1).
leads_to(hall, bedroom2).
leads_to(hall, bedroom3).
leads_to(hall, studio).
leads_to(living_room, outside). % Note "outside" is the only node that is not a "room"
leads_to(kitchen, outside).
% Define the indirection of the graph. This is what we'll work with.
neighbor(A,B) :- leads_to(A, B).
neighbor(A,B) :- leads_to(B, A).
Iff A --> B --> C --> D is a loop-free path, then
path(A, D, [B, C])
should be true. I.e., the third argument contains the intermediate nodes.
% Base Rule (R0)
path(X,Y,[]) :- neighbor(X,Y).
% Inductive Rule (R1)
path(X,Y,[Z|P]) :- not(X == Y), neighbor(X,Z), not(member(Z, P)), path(Z,Y,P).
Yet,
?- path(bedroom1, stairs, P).
is false. Why? Shouldn't we get a match to R1 with
X = bedroom1
Y = stairs
Z = hall
P = []
since,
?- neighbor(bedroom1, hall).
true.
?- not(member(hall, [])).
true.
?- path(hall, stairs, []).
true .
?
In fact, if I evaluate
?- path(A, B, P).
I get only the length-1 solutions.
Welcome to Prolog! The problem, essentially, is that when you get to not(member(Z, P)) in R1, P is still a pure variable, because the evaluation hasn't gotten to path(Z, Y, P) to define it yet. One of the surprising yet inspiring things about Prolog is that member(Ground, Var) will generate lists that contain Ground and unify them with Var:
?- member(a, X).
X = [a|_G890] ;
X = [_G889, a|_G893] ;
X = [_G889, _G892, a|_G896] .
This has the confusing side-effect that checking for a value in an uninstantiated list will always succeed, which is why not(member(Z, P)) will always fail, causing R1 to always fail. The fact that you get all the R0 solutions and none of the R1 solutions is a clue that something in R1 is causing it to always fail. After all, we know R0 works.
If you swap these two goals, you'll get the first result you want:
path(X,Y,[Z|P]) :- not(X == Y), neighbor(X,Z), path(Z,Y,P), not(member(Z, P)).
?- path(bedroom1, stairs, P).
P = [hall]
If you ask for another solution, you'll get a stack overflow. This is because after the change we're happily generating solutions with cycles as quickly as possible with path(Z,Y,P), only to discard them post-facto with not(member(Z, P)). (Incidentally, for a slight efficiency gain we can switch to memberchk/2 instead of member/2. Of course doing the wrong thing faster isn't much help. :)
I'd be inclined to convert this to a breadth-first search, which in Prolog would imply adding an "open set" argument to contain solutions you haven't tried yet, and at each node first trying something in the open set and then adding that node's possibilities to the end of the open set. When the open set is extinguished, you've tried every node you could get to. For some path finding problems it's a better solution than depth first search anyway. Another thing you could try is separating the path into a visited and future component, and only checking the visited component. As long as you aren't generating a cycle in the current step, you can be assured you aren't generating one at all, there's no need to worry about future steps.
The way you worded the question leads me to believe you don't want a complete solution, just a hint, so I think this is all you need. Let me know if that's not right.

Find all possible pairs between the subsets of N sets with Erlang

I have a set S. It contains N subsets (which in turn contain some sub-subsets of various lengths):
1. [[a,b],[c,d],[*]]
2. [[c],[d],[e,f],[*]]
3. [[d,e],[f],[f,*]]
N. ...
I also have a list L of 'unique' elements that are contained in the set S:
a, b, c, d, e, f, *
I need to find all possible combinations between each sub-subset from each subset so, that each resulting combination has exactly one element from the list L, but any number of occurrences of the element [*] (it is a wildcard element).
So, the result of the needed function working with the above mentioned set S should be (not 100% accurate):
- [a,b],[c],[d,e],[f];
- [a,b],[c],[*],[d,e],[f];
- [a,b],[c],[d,e],[f],[*];
- [a,b],[c],[d,e],[f,*],[*];
So, basically I need an algorithm that does the following:
take a sub-subset from the subset 1,
add one more sub-subset from the subset 2 maintaining the list of 'unique' elements acquired so far (the check on the 'unique' list is skipped if the sub-subset contains the * element);
Repeat 2 until N is reached.
In other words, I need to generate all possible 'chains' (it is pairs, if N == 2, and triples if N==3), but each 'chain' should contain exactly one element from the list L except the wildcard element * that can occur many times in each generated chain.
I know how to do this with N == 2 (it is a simple pair generation), but I do not know how to enhance the algorithm to work with arbitrary values for N.
Maybe Stirling numbers of the second kind could help here, but I do not know how to apply them to get the desired result.
Note: The type of data structure to be used here is not important for me.
Note: This question has grown out from my previous similar question.
These are some pointers (not a complete code) that can take you to right direction probably:
I don't think you will need some advanced data structures here (make use of erlang list comprehensions). You must also explore erlang sets and lists module. Since you are dealing with sets and list of sub-sets, they seems like an ideal fit.
Here is how things with list comprehensions will get solved easily for you: [{X,Y} || X <- [[c],[d],[e,f]], Y <- [[a,b],[c,d]]]. Here i am simply generating a list of {X,Y} 2-tuples but for your use case you will have to put real logic here (including your star case)
Further note that with list comprehensions, you can use output of one generator as input of a later generator e.g. [{X,Y} || X1 <- [[c],[d],[e,f]], X <- X1, Y1 <- [[a,b],[c,d]], Y <- Y1].
Also for removing duplicates from a list of things L = ["a", "b", "a"]., you can anytime simply do sets:to_list(sets:from_list(L)).
With above tools you can easily generate all possible chains and also enforce your logic as these chains get generated.

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