Ryan's Repository of Random Reflections

Suppose you have a 2d numpy array and you want to remove duplicate rows (or columns).  In this blog post, I'll show you a trick you can use to do this more efficiently than using np.unique(A, axis=0) .  This algorithm has time complexity $O(\max(n \log{n}, n m))$ for an $n \times m$ matrix, and works almost surely .  By "almost surely" I mean that it is a randomized algorithm that works correctly with probability $1$.  To find the unique rows of a matrix $A$, the algorithm works by generating a random vector $x$ of real numbers, computing the dot product $y = A x$, then analyzing the unique elements of $y$.  The indices of unique elements in $y$ is the same as the unique row indices in $A$ with probability $1$.  Below is an example to demonstrate how it works: > import numpy as np > A = np.random.randint(low=0, high=3, size=(10, 2)) > A array([[2, 1], [1, 2], [0, 0], [2, 2], [1, 2], [0, 0], [0, 2], ...

This semester I took the machine learning class at UMass, and for my final project I developed models for predicting characteristics of pitches based on the context that they were thrown in.  The context consists of relevant and available information known before the pitch is thrown, such as the identities of the batter and pitcher, the batter height and stance, the pitcher handedness, the current count, and many others.  In particular, I looked into modeling the distribution over pitch types and locations.  This problem is challenging primarily because for a particular context (a specific setting of the different features that make up the context), there is usually very little data available for pitches thrown in that context.  In general, for each context feature we include, we have to split up our data into $k$, groups where $k$ is the number of values that the context feature can take on (for batter stance it is $k=2$, for count it is $k=12$, etc).  Thus, de...