Book Image

Functional Python Programming, 3rd edition - Third Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Functional Python Programming, 3rd edition - Third Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Not enough developers understand the benefits of functional programming, or even what it is. Author Steven Lott demystifies the approach, teaching you how to improve the way you code in Python and make gains in memory use and performance. If you’re a leetcoder preparing for coding interviews, this book is for you. Starting from the fundamentals, this book shows you how to apply functional thinking and techniques in a range of scenarios, with Python 3.10+ examples focused on mathematical and statistical algorithms, data cleaning, and exploratory data analysis. You'll learn how to use generator expressions, list comprehensions, and decorators to your advantage. You don't have to abandon object-oriented design completely, though – you'll also see how Python's native object orientation is used in conjunction with functional programming techniques. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed in the essential functional programming features of Python and understand why and when functional thinking helps. You'll also have all the tools you need to pursue any additional functional topics that are not part of the Python language.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Preface
16
Other Books You Might Enjoy
17
Index

7.6 Avoiding stateful classes by using families of tuples

In several previous examples, we’ve shown the idea of wrap-unwrap design patterns that allow us to work with anonymous and named tuples. The point of this kind of design is to use immutable objects that wrap other immutable objects instead of mutable instance variables.

A common statistical measure of correlation between two sets of data is the Spearman’s rank correlation. This compares the rankings of two variables. Rather than trying to compare values, which might have different units of measure, we’ll compare the relative orders. For more information, visit: https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/software/dataplot/refman2/auxillar/partraco.htm.

Computing the Spearman’s rank correlation requires assigning a rank value to each observation. It seems like we should be able to use enumerate(sorted()) to do this. Given two sets of possibly correlated data, we can transform each set into a sequence of rank values...