Suppose that I have 10 values n_1, n_2, ... n_10 and that given any 1 of these value, the other 9 can be calculated. Let f_i(n_j) be the function that calculates the value n_i using the values of n_j (where i != j). These functions are relatively simple (i.e. contain no more than a few exponential functions or powers).
In terms of the functions used, what would be the most efficient way of creating a program to calculate the other 9 values in n_1, ..., n_10 given the 1 that is initially known?
Would the best option be to minimize the number of functions used (and thus minimize the number of lines of code), or to create a function defining every single mapping?
For example, would it be most efficient to use only the 18 functions
f_1(n_2), f_1(n_3), ..., f_1(n_10) [1]
f_2(n_1), f_3(n_1), ..., f_10(n_1) [2]
And then, for whatever input is provided by the user, the value of n_1 may be calculated by using the relevant function in line 1, from which every other value of intererest may be calculated using functions from line [2]?
Or would it be better to define all 90 mappings, and so that only a single function (rather than 2 functions) must be called to calculate each of the 9 other values?
Edit: The specific result that I am trying to achieve is as follows...
I am currently using VBA, with a user form of the following format:
The conversion frequency is a required field (so lets just say, for example, that it is always equal to 2 and forget about it). I want to use on change events so that whenever the user changes any of the 6 fields below the conversion frequency field, the other 5 fields are auto-filled with the correct value. However, since the user need only update any one out of six fields, with the other 5 fields being calculated from this, we will require 6^6-6 = 30 different functions to do these calculations. We will thus end up with a lot of repetitive code.
My question regards the best practices to follow when working with a form where one of many inputs may be provided, and all other fields must be updated as a result of the input provided and its value.
Or, equivalently, is there a way to update all fields when the value of one field changes? Can this be done without the number of lines of code required increasing exponentially as the number of fields increases?
I think you are grossly overthinking this. Think of this in terms of the formulas you need; which I think are 6. 6 functions that take 5 inputs each:
calculateEIR(nominalInterestRate, ForceOfInterest, DiscountFactor, EffectiveDiscountRate, NominalDiscountRate)
calculateNIR(EffectiveInterestRate, ForceOfInterest, DiscountFactor, EffectiveDiscountRate, NominalDiscountRate)
' and so on...
The event handlers, and the code to calculate the values are their own thing. Your onchange event handlers simply need to call the correct methods; this is 6 event handlers calling 5 methods each, so 11 functions if you want to keep count. It's a lot of copypasta. For example:
sub textEffectiveInterestRate_onchange()
Me.textNominalInterstRate.value = calculateNIR(Me.textEffectiveInterestRate.value, Me.textForceOfInterest.value, etc...)
Me.textForceOfInterest.value = calculateForceOfInterest(Me.textEffectiveInterestRate.value, Me.textNominalInterstRate.value, etc...)
' And every other function aside from calculateEIR()
end sub
I am unsure about the specifics of how you are changing all the values based on a change in the others (since I don't know the formulas), but in general, you should not in any way need 30 functions...
Related
I have a tableau table as follows:
This data can be visualized as follows:
I'd like to flag cases that have lumps/clusters. This would flag items B, C and D because there are spikes only in certain weeks of the 13 weeks. Items A and E would not be flagged as they mostly have a 'flat' profile.
How can I create such a flag in Tableau or SQL to isolate this kind of a case?
What I have tried so far?:
I've tried a logic where for each item I calculate the MAX and MEDIAN. Items that need to be flagged will have a larger (MAX - MEDIAN) value than items that have a fairly 'flat' profile.
Please let me know if there's a better way to create this flag.
Thanks!
Agree with the other commenters that this question could be answered in many different ways and you might need a PhD in Stats to come up with an ideal answer. However, given your basic requirements this might be the easiest/simplest solution you can implement.
Here is what I did to get here:
Create a parameter to define your "spike". If it is going to always be a fixed number you can hardcode this in your formulas. I called min "Min Spike Value".
Create a formula for the Median Values in each bucket. {fixed [Buckets]: MEDIAN([Values])} . (A, B, ... E = "Buckets"). This gives you one value for each letter/bucket that you can compare against.
Create a formula to calculate the difference of each number against the median. abs(sum([Values])-sum([Median Values])). We use the absolute value here because a spike can either be negative or positive (again, if you want to define it that way...). I called this "Spike to Current Value abs difference"
Create a calculated field that evaluates to a boolean to see if the current value is above the threshold for a spike. [Spike to Current Value abs difference] > min([Min Spike Value])
Setup your viz to use this boolean to highlight the spikes. The beauty of the parameter is you can change the value for what a spike should be and it will highlight accordingly. Above the value was 4, but if you change it to 8:
I have a Prometheus counter, for which I want to get its rate on a time range (the real target is to sum the rate, and sometimes use histogram_quantile on that for histogram metric).
However, I've got multiple machines running that kind of job, each one sets its own instance label. This causes different inc operations on this counter in different machines to create different entities of the counter, as the combination of labels values is unique.
The problem is that rate() works separately on each such counter entity.
The result is that counter entities with unique combinations don't get into account for rate().
For example, if I've got:
mycounter{aaa="1",instance="1.2.3.4:6666",job="job1"} value: 1
mycounter{aaa="2",instance="1.2.3.4:6666",job="job1"} value: 1
mycounter{aaa="2",instance="1.2.3.4:7777",job="job1"} value: 1
mycounter{aaa="1",instance="5.5.5.5:6666",job="job1"} value: 1
All counter entities are unique, so they get values of 1.
If counter labels are always unique (come from different machines), rate(mycounter[5m]) would get values of 0 in this case,
and sum(rate(mycounter[5m])) would get 0, which is not what I need!
I want to ignore the instance label so that it would refer these mycounter inc operations as they were made on the same counter entity.
In other words, I expect to have only 2 entities (they can have a common instance value or no instance label):
mycounter{aaa="1", job="job1"} value: 2
mycounter{aaa="2", job="job1"} value: 2
In such a case, inc operation in new machine (with existing aaa value) would increase some entity counter instead of adding new entity with value of 1, and rate() would get real rates for each, so we may sum() them.
How do I do that?
I made several tries to solve it but all failed:
Doing a rate() of the sum() - fails because of type mismatch...
Removing the automatic instance label, using metric_relabel_configswork with action: labeldrop in configuration, but then it assigns the default address value.
Changing all instance values to a common one using metric_relabel_configswork with replacement, but it seems that one of the entities overwrites all others, so it doesn't help...
Any suggestions?
Prometheus version: 2.3.2
Thanks in Advance!
You'd better expose your counters at 0 on application start, if the other labels (aaa, etc) have a limited set of possible combinations. This way rate() function works correctly at the bottom level and sum() will give you correct results.
If you have to do a rate() of the sum(), read this first:
Note that when combining rate() with an aggregation operator (e.g. sum()) or a function aggregating over time (any function ending in _over_time), always take a rate() first, then aggregate. Otherwise rate() cannot detect counter resets when your target restarts.
If you can tolerate this (or the instances reset counters at the same time), there's a way to work around. Define a recording rule as
record: job:mycounter:sum
expr: sum without(instance) (mycounter)
and then this expression works:
sum(rate(job:mycounter:sum[5m]))
The obvious query rate(sum(...)) won't work in most cases, since the resulting sum(...) may hide possible resets to zero for individual time series, which are passed to sum. So usually the correct answer is to use sum(rate(...)) instead. See this article for details.
Unfortunately, Prometheus may miss some increases for slow-changing counter when calculating rate() as shown in the original question above. The same applies to increase() calculations. See this issue, this comment and this article for details. Prometheus developers are going to fix these issues - see this design doc.
In the mean time try to use VictoriaMetrics when you need exact values for rate() and increase() functions over slow-changing counter (and distributed counter).
Disclaimer: Numbers below are randomly generated
What I'm trying to do is, purely in VBA, look at the ratio of [column B]/[column A] and checking whether or not the ratio in row 10 (=1,241/468) is below the minimum of the ratios or above the maximum of the ratios in rows 1 through 9 but only compared to the rows where there is a 1 in column C.
That is, compare Cell(B10)/Cell(A10) to Cell(B2)/Cell(A2), Cell(B3)/Cell(A3), etc. (only comparing against rows with a 1 in column C).
The workbook I'm working with has a lot more data and columns and I'm not allowed to explicitly edit the cells, so defining a new column is out of the question. Is there a way to do this in VBA such that it essentially returns a boolean depending whether or not the ratio in the last row violates the threshold defined above?
You can achieve the minimum and maximum ratios (with criteria) easily with the AGGREGATE¹ function's SMALL sub-function and LARGE sub-function.
The formulas in D13:E13 are,
=AGGREGATE(15, 6, ((B1:B9)/(A1:A9))/C1:C9, 1)
=AGGREGATE(14, 6, ((B1:B9)/(A1:A9))/C1:C9, 1)
The 6 is the AGGREGATE parameter for ignoring error values. By dividing the ratio
by the value in column C we are producing #DIV/0! errors for anything we do not want considered leaving them ignored. If the values in C were more diverse, we could divide by (C1:C9=1) to produce the same results.
Since we are using the SMALL and LARGE sub-functions, we can easily retrieve the second, third, etc. ratios by increasing the k parameter (the 1 off the back end).
I've modified some of the values in your sample slightly to demonstrate that the min and max with criteria are being picked up correctly.
These can be adapted to VBA with the WorksheetFunction object or Application.Evaluate method.
¹The AGGREGATE¹ function's was introduced with Excel 2010. It is not available in previous versions.
When using forecast, you input a number and it should return a value based on the known X data and Known Y data.
However if you put in a time this does not work.
I need two things.
First of all I need the VBA equivalent of forecast. I suspect this to be application.forecast
Then how to use the date as a value for the forecast to work as it should
The formula is as follows:
=FORECAST(15:00:00,A10:A33,B10:B33)
Currently this equation flags up an error.
Any ideas to get this to work for time values?
I see two potential problem areas. The first is the time. Use the TIME function to get a precise time. Second, in D9:D12, the values are left-aligned. Typically, this means they are text, not true numbers. If you absolutely require the m suffix, use a Custom number Format of General\m in order that they retain their numeric status while displaying an m as an increment suffix. If you type the m in, they become text-that-look-like-numbers and are useless for any maths.
=FORECAST(TIME(15, 0, 0), B10:B33, A10:A33)
That returns 3.401666667 which is either 09:38 AM or 3.4 m (it's been a while since I played with the FORECAST function).
Whenever I have some records/objects that I want to be in a certain order, I usually create a field called Ordinal.
I often wonder if it would be better to use an integer or a decimal value for the ordinal field.
This is a consideration when moving an object to a different position in the order:
If you use consecutive integers, you have to do some serious reworking of all of the ordinals (or at least the ordinals that fall before the original position of the object being moved).
If you use integers but space them out (maybe at 1000 intervals), then you can just change the ordinal to a mid point value between the surrounding objects where you want to move the object. This could fail if somewhere down the line you end up with consecutive integers.
If you use decimal numbers you could just find the average of the surround object's ordinals and use that for the object to be moved.
Maybe it would be possible to use a string, but I could see that getting pretty goofy.
I'm sure there are other considerations I haven't thought of.
What do you use and why?
"This could fail if somewhere down the line you end up with consecutive integers."
For this (probably rare and thus not performance important) case, you could implement a renumber method that spaces out again. When I used to program in COMAL (anyone know that language?), you could do this very thing with line numbers.
Decimals seem to solve your problem pretty well. Since Decimals are just base 10 floats, you actually have a lot of digits available. Unless you've seen cases where you've gotten out to quite a few digits and had reason to suspect a reason for an unlimited number of digits being necessary, I'd let it ride.
If you really need an alternative and don't see a need to stick with a basic data bype, you might go with tumbler arithmetic. The basic idea is that it's a place notation that is infinitely expandable at each position. Pretty simple conceptually.
I used to use a decimal type for a field of this kind to order records in a table, which we actually exposed to the customer so that they could set their own order. Although it sounds cheesy our customers liked it; they found it very intuitive. They caught on very quickly that they could use numbers like 21.5 to move something between 21 and 22.
Maybe it's because they were accountants.
I use integers and just rearrange as necessary when a new item needs to be inserted in the middle of the order. Since you can create the necessary gap with a single update statement, it's fairly trivial. However, I've only ever done this on lookup tables of a few dozen rows at most, obviously this scales a bit poorly. But I would say that if you need a solution to this problem for a large number of rows, the process(es) for maintaining the order should be proceduralized anyway, which makes the choice of data type largely moot.
I remember this being a similar question to a previous post. It can be found here:
SQL Server Priority Ordering
The linked list would still work, but this is a much easier solution if you don't want to track a parent child relationship.
Sounds like what you want is a linked list. That way you always know what comes next and you don't have to guess. So the position field would be a pointer to the object following it.
The problem I have always had with using arbitrary numbers for position, is that it can quickly fall to entropy. What if more items get added and the number become consecutive etc. etc. It can quickly become unmanageable if the list of items changes position.
To implement this in sql server table, add another field with the same data type as the primary key. If the field is null then it is the bottom element in the list. If you are storing multiple lists in the same table you will probably want to add another field called ListID which designates all rows with the same ListID pertain to the same list. So something like this.
Table:
ID INT
ListID INT
Child INT
Pararent Row For first list:
1, 1, 2
First Child
2, 1, 3
Second Child
3, 1, NULL
Parent Row for second list:
4, 2, 5
First Child
5, 2, 6
Second Child
6, 2, NULL
You'll probably have to do an insert and an update every time you add a row, which can be a little tedious, but it will always make the list line up.
Is the "certain order" based on data outside of the table? If so, why not include it so you can do the sorting dynamically? If it's already in the table, adding a field is redundant.