Higher Order Functions

Special thanks to Scott Shawcroft, Ryan Tucker, and Paul Beck for their work on these slides.
Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0
 Functions as parameters
• Have you ever wanted to pass an entire function as
a parameter
• Python has functions as first-class citizens, so you
can do this
• You simply pass the functions by name

2
 Higher-Order Functions
• A higher-order function is a function that takes
another function as a parameter
• They are “higher-order” because it’s a function of a
function
• Examples
– Map
– Reduce
– Filter
• Lambda works great as a parameter to higher-order
functions if you can deal with its limitations

3
 Map
map(function, iterable, ...)

• Map applies function to each element of

iterable and creates a list of the results
• You can optionally provide more iterables as
parameters to map and it will place tuples in
the result list
• Map returns an iterator which can be cast to
list

4
 Map Example

Example

1 nums = [0, 4, 7, 2, 1, 0 , 9 , 3, 5, 6, 8, 0, 3]
2
3 nums = list(map(lambda x : x % 5, nums))
4
5 print(nums)
6 #[0, 4, 2, 2, 1, 0, 4, 3, 0, 1, 3, 0, 3]
7

5
 Map Problem
Goal: given a list of three dimensional points in
the form of tuples, create a new list consisting
of the distances of each point from the origin

Loop Method:
- distance(x, y, z) = sqrt(x**2 + y**2 + z**2)
- loop through the list and add results to a
new list

6
 Map Problem

Solution

1 from math import sqrt

2
3 points = [(2, 1, 3), (5, 7, -3), (2, 4, 0), (9, 6, 8)]
4
5 def distance(point) :
6 x, y, z = point
7 return sqrt(x**2 + y**2 + z**2)
8
9 distances = list(map(distance, points))

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 Filter
filter(function, iterable)
• The filter runs through each element of iterable
(any iterable object such as a List or another
collection)
• It applies function to each element of iterable
• If function returns True for that element then the
element is put into a List
• This list is returned from filter in versions of
python under 3
• In python 3, filter returns an iterator which must
be cast to type list with list()

8
 Filter Example

Example

1 nums = [0, 4, 7, 2, 1, 0 , 9 , 3, 5, 6, 8, 0, 3]
2
3 nums = list(filter(lambda x : x != 0, nums))
4
5 print(nums) #[4, 7, 2, 1, 9, 3, 5, 6, 8, 3]
6

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 Filter Problem
NaN = float("nan")
scores = [[NaN, 12, .5, 78, math.pi],
[2, 13, .5, .7, math.pi / 2],
[2, NaN, .5, 78, math.pi],
[2, 14, .5, 39, 1 - math.pi]]

Goal: given a list of lists containing answers to

an algebra exam, filter out those that did not
submit a response for one of the questions,
denoted by NaN

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 Filter Problem
Solution

1 NaN = float("nan")
2 scores = [[NaN, 12, .5, 78, pi],[2, 13, .5, .7, pi / 2],
3 [2,NaN, .5, 78, pi],[2, 14, .5, 39, 1 - pi]]
4 #solution 1 - intuitive
5 def has_NaN(answers) :
6 for num in answers :
7 if isnan(float(num)) :
8 return False
9 return True
0 valid = list(filter(has_NaN, scores))
1 print(valid2)
2 #Solution 2 – sick python solution
3 valid = list(filter(lambda x : NaN not in x, scores))
4 print(valid)

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 Reduce
reduce(function, iterable[,initializer])

• Reduce will apply function to each element in

iterable along with the sum so far and create a
cumulative sum of the results
• function must take two parameters
• If initializer is provided, initializer will stand as the
first argument in the sum
• Unfortunately in python 3 reduce() requires an import
statement
• from functools import reduce

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 Reduce Example

Example

1 nums = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
2
3 nums = list(reduce(lambda x, y : (x, y), nums))
4
5 Print(nums) #(((((((1, 2), 3), 4), 5), 6), 7), 8)
6
7

13
 Reduce Problem
Goal: given a list of numbers I want to find the
average of those numbers in a few lines using
reduce()

For Loop Method:

- sum up every element of the list
- divide the sum by the length of the list

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 Reduce Problem

Solution

1 nums = [92, 27, 63, 43, 88, 8, 38, 91, 47, 74, 18, 16,
29, 21, 60, 27, 62, 59, 86, 56]
2
3 sum = reduce(lambda x, y : x + y, nums) / len(nums)
4

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 MapReduce
A framework for processing huge datasets on certain
kinds of distributable problems

Map Step:
- master node takes the input, chops it up
into smaller sub-problems, and
distributes those to worker nodes.
- worker node may chop its work into yet
small pieces and redistribute again

16
 MapReduce
Reduce Step:
- master node then takes the answers to
all the sub-problems and combines them in a
way to get the output

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 MapReduce

Problem: Given an email how do you tell if it is

spam?

- Count occurrences of certain words. If

they occur too frequently the email is
spam.

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 MapReduce
map_reduce.py

1 email = ['the', 'this', 'annoy', 'the', 'the', 'annoy']

2
3 def inEmail (x):
if (x == "the"):
4 return 1;
5 else:
return 0;
6
map(inEmail, l) #[1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0]
7
8 reduce((lambda x, xs: x + xs), map(inEmail, email)) #3
9
1
0

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