A subclass of dictionary that ensures that values are nonnegative, less than or equal to 1, and sum to 1. It also gives 0 for any attempt at looking up a key not in it, and purges keys whose associated value falls to 0.
Download
Copy to clipboard1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 | from numbers import Real
class ProbDict(dict):
"""A dictionary serving as a probability measure."""
def __init__(self, items = None):
"""Create a dictionary from iters.
If items can't be fed to a dictionary, it will be interpreted as a
collection of keys, and each value will default to value 1/n. Otherwise,
the values are normalized to sum to one. Raises ValueError if
some values are not numbers or are negative.
Arguments:
- `items`: argument with which to make dictionary
"""
if items is None: return dict.__init__(self)
try:
# can fail if items is not iterable or not full of size 2 items:
dict.__init__(self, items)
except TypeError:
try:
# Let's assume items is a finite iterable full of keys
vals = [1/len(items)] * len(items)
except TypeError:
# Apparently items has no length -- let's take it as the only
# key and put all the probability on it.
dict.__init__(self, (items, 1))
else:
# if items has a length, it can be iterated through with zip
dict.__init__(self, zip(items, vals))
else:
# we've successfully made dic from key, value pairs in items, now let's
# normalize the dictionary, and check the values
for v in self.values():
if not isinstance(v, Real):
raise TypeError("Values must be nonnegative real numbers so I " +
"can properly normalize them. " + str(v) + " is not.")
elif v < 0:
raise ValueError("Values must be nonnegative, unlike " + str(v))
tot = sum(self.values())
for k, v in self.items(): self[k] = v/tot
def __setitem__(self, key, value):
# Overridden to make sure dict is normalized.
if not isinstance(value, Real) or value < 0 or value > 1:
raise ValueError("Value must be a number between 0 and 1, unlike " +
str(i))
try:
r = (self[key] - value)/(1 - self[key])
# r is the fraction of the remaining probability mass that
# we're going to give up (take).
for k in filter(key.__ne__, self):
dict.__setitem__(self, k, self[k] * (1 + r))
value = value if len(self) != 1 else 1
if value:
dict.__setitem__(self, key, value)
else:
# This is the purging stage!
dict.__delitem__(self, key)
except ZeroDivisionError:
# self[key] = 1, so key has all the probability mass. We'll leave it
# as is, since there's no sensible way of reducing it.
pass
def __delitem__(self, key):
# Deleting frees up probability mass!
self[key] = 0
# Note that __setitem__ handles the deletion for us.
def __missing__(self, key):
# Accessing an inexistent key gives 0 rather than error, but
# does not create key, val pair (unlike defaultdict)
return 0
|
The idea here is that you have some disjoint events with some probabilities contained in the dictionary. Updating one probability, perhaps because you have a better estimate of what it may be, will keep the relative probabilities of all the others intact. In math speak, P(X | ~Y), will not change as you vary P(Y). There is no good way of updating several probabilities in succession, because the optimal implementation will depend on what use you want to give it.
The simplest would be defining an update(self, keys, vals) method that calculates P(keys[i] | ~vals[i+1:]) and goes from there:
def update(self, keys, vals): conditionals = dict(zip(keys, (v/(1 - sum(vals[i+1:]))) for i, v in enumerate(vals)) for key in keys: self[key] = 0 for key in keys: self[key] = conditionals[key]
with some adequate type checking and such. I didn't include it because you may need a different implementation depending on how your probabilities will evolve.
