Homework 4: Data Drama

Due: Wednesday, February 19th, 11:59 PM

Setup

• Create a file in Pyret called hw4-code.arr where you will write your Homework 4 solution.
• Create a file in your preferred word processor (Google Docs, Word, TextEdit, WordPad, etc) called hw4-src.pdf. This will hold your written work. Do not include your name in your SRC submission!
• Do not put your name anywhere in the file.
• Copy and paste the starter code in the next section into hw4-code.arr

Stencil Code and Resources

Copy and paste the code in the following dropdown into hw4-code.arr. Remember to change your context to dcic2024, just like in HW3!

Expand here for HW4 starter code

include gdrive-sheets
include data-source

ALL-DATA = load-spreadsheet("1wWEI3nx64xkbpV9Ey06Ho_yvNQcWi8KpyQAtGlQmcfo")

CURRENCY-CONVERSION = load-table: from-c :: String, to-c :: String, conv-rate :: Number
​​source: ALL-DATA.sheet-by-name("currency", true)
end

# Uncomment for Part 2
#|
ART = load-table: id :: Number, cost :: Number, currency :: String, kind :: String
​​source: ALL-DATA.sheet-by-name("art", true)
end
|#

Remember your resources!

• Pyret documentation
• How to create a plan
• CS0111 Table documentation (use this instead of the built-in Table documentation)
• Information on lambda expressions for Tables
• TA hours
• Edstem
• Code clarity guide

Big Picture

Remember to use the CS0111 Table documentation from above (also linked in Setup and Handin), NOT the official documentation. If your code uses constructs named sieve or extend (without functions), for example, you are using the wrong version and will not get credit.

This assignment has you practice a multi-stage data-analysis task. We're going to write functions that draw on data from two tables to perform computations. We'll also do multiple versions of a function, where each version adds more features, so you can see an example of building up solutions a bit at a time.

This assignment draws on all of the table lectures so far. For the planning tasks, we saw an example on Feb 12, and you're also practicing it in Lab 3. While we have covered everything that you need as of Feb 12, the examples we do in class on Feb 14 will give more practice with the concepts in this assignment.

Important: as you start working on more complicated programming problems, we want you to practice planning out your tasks before you start coding. Taking the time to plan your approach to the programming tasks can potentially save hours of debugging time. We have given you some guidance on planning here.

The Assignment

As an international organization, Highland Cow LCC (limited cow corporation) has to deal with the complexities of currency exchange rates. In order to do this, the leaders at Highland Cow LCC have to manipulate tables containing complicated data. This homework will get you ready to join Highland Cow LCC by using your table skills to uncover important information. Once you've practiced your skills, one of your new co-workers, Karis, also needs some help evaluating art sales and keeping track of some names.

Part 1: Prices Under Exchange Rates

Learning Goals:

• Practice planning programs
• Combine data across two tables to answer a question

Companies that do business internationally need to be able to quote prices in different currencies, following a table of exchange rates. This is the kind of situation where one would have two separate tables: one with the prices of items, and another with the exchange rates per country. For this problem, we'll be computing currency conversions for an online art store in which artists and clients may be in different countries.

The store has two tables, that are both in your starter code. One is for artwork, called ART: it tracks the unique id, cost and base currency for each piece, as well as what kind of artwork it is. It has some errors in the data, which we will clean up in the next part. It is commented out – ignore it for now.

table: id :: Number, cost :: Number, currency :: String, kind :: String

The other table is for currency conversion, called CURRENCY-CONVERSION. Each row holds the conversion rate (the multiplicative factor) to convert from the first currency (from-c) to the second (to-c).

table: from-c :: String, to-c :: String, conv-rate :: Number

For example, if a row of the Table looked like:

["EUR" "TND" 3.32]

we would convert from Euros (EUR) to Tunisian Dinars (TND) by multiplying the price in Euros by 3.32.

We will use these tables to develop several programs for selling art across currencies.

How do I see what the Tables in this assignment look like?

Unlike in Homework 3, these tables are not typed directly into Pyret, but rather pulled in from a Google Sheet. To see what these Tables look like, feel free to type the name of the Table in the definitions window and hit "Run", or hit "Run" first and then type the name in the interactions window and hit return.

For these tasks, you can use our CURRENCY-CONVERSION Table when writing tests.

Task 1: Write a function called exchange-price-1, which takes in as input a Table that has the same columns as CURRENCY-CONVERSION, a starting currency (a String), a desired currency (a String), and a price (a Number), and returns a Number of the price converted from the starting currency to the desired currency. For this exercise, you can assume that a row with the starting currency in the "from-c" column and the desired currency in the "to-c" column exists exactly once in the table. For now, do not worry about handling the case of converting a currency to itself. Remember to make a plan for this task before starting to code it up!

How do the stated assumptions affect how you should write tests?

For this and every homework problem that has text like "you can assume that a row appears exactly once in the table," your test cases should obey this assumption. That is, for this problem, do not include tests like exchange-price-1(CURRENCY-CONVERSION, "JPY", "EUR"), since this test violates the assumption (there are no rows with "JPY" in the "from-c" column and "EUR" in the "to-c" column in this Table).

How do I write tests for decimal numbers?

Remember that you can use mathematical expressions in tests, such as 0.25 is 1/4.

Pyret also has an is-roughly, but it will be much easier to use the mathematical expression instead.

Task 2: Sometimes, we cannot make the assumption that we make in Task 1. For this task, assume that input currency conversion table may not list the conversion from A to B, but it may list the conversion from B to A. Write a function called exchange-price-2, which has the same inputs and output as exchange-price-1, but uses the direct conversion (as in Task 1) or the inverse conversion if necessary. (You compute the inverse of a number N using 1 / N, where / is division). Remember to make a plan for this task before starting to code it up!

Details:

• You should also account for the case where the starting currency and the desired currency are the same, even if the Table does not contain the relevant row. (Hint: what would the conversion rate be in this case?)
• For cases where the starting currency and desired currency are different, you can assume that a row with one currency in the "to-c" and the other currency in the "from-c" column appears in the Table. If there are multiple matching rows, you can assume that they are consistent with each other (that is, if you have a Row with A in to-c and B in from-c, and a row with B in to-c and A in from-c, no matter if you choose to do the direct conversion or the inverse conversion, you will get approximately the same answer.)

Task 3: Create a function called plot-exchange-rates which takes in a Table that has the same columns as CURRENCY-CONVERSION and a starting currency (a String) and produces a bar chart of conversion rates from the given currency to all the other available currencies, that is, currencies for which there exists either a direct or an inverse conversion (or both) from the given currency. Remember to make a plan for this task before starting to code it up!

Important: Please put the line import bar-chart from shared-gdrive("dcic-2021", "1wyQZj_L0qqV9Ekgr9au6RX2iqt2Ga8Ep") at the top of your file in order to use bar-chart. bar-chart was accidentally left out of the dcic2024 context, and we've contacted the creators of the context to get this fixed, but we have to use this quick fix for now.

This is one of the more complex tasks in this assignment - you might think about how you will do it, and then move on to other tasks in the assignment and come back to it. If you get stuck, try one of the following strategies:

• Revising your plan or talking through it in hours/on Ed
• Closing the Pyret window, drawing out what you want the result to look like on paper, and thinking about the steps you are taking/ways you are interacting with your data
• Getting a good night's sleep or working on something else (seriously, sometimes the brain just needs a rest before looking at the problem anew!)
• Giving yourself a time limit to work on the problem and then turning in the homework regardless (it's worth a fraction of the points on one assignment, and sometimes there are more important things in life!)

Questions to ask yourself when making a plan

• How do you make sure that you only include the available currencies in your answer?
• Sometimes, the other currency will be in the "from-c" column, and other times, it will be in the "to-c" column. Remember that the y-axis of the bar-chart function comes from only one column. How can you make sure that the bar chart includes both of these cases?
• How do you create a plot that uses the inverse conversion if the direct conversion is not available?

Stuck on where to start?

In class, we discussed that a Table that we're given sometimes does not contain a column with the exact information we need. In that case, we need to do some computations to get the Table into a usable state. This could include isolating/keeping desired values from the original dataset. Consider what sort of column(s) would be helpful to add to this table?

If you are finding that the computation for adding on a column is too complex, work on creating a helper function that can take in a row or the relevant information from a row and perform the computation for a single row's worth of data. Test it thoroughly by pulling some example Rows from the Table to gain confidence that it's working!

Part 2: Data cleaning

This section deals with the ART Table. Most of the section is exploratory (you are meant to write short pieces of code and write down what you notice, but not turn in code), with one coding task that you turn in.

In the Feb 14 lecture, we learned that there are multiple approaches to cleaning data: using sanitizers, manually cleaning up the source spreadsheet, filtering out rows that we recognize as malformed, and writing functions to clean up columns. One of your jobs in these tasks will be to determine which of these approaches makes the most sense for different kinds of messy data.

Task 4: Uncomment the block below the line that says # Uncomment for Part 2 by removing the surrounding #| and |#, and try to run the code. You will encounter one error. Using what you learned in class, change the load-table block of code so that this error no longer happens (Note: column A corresponds to the "id" column). Even though the error text will hint towards editing the Google sheet itself, you can and should resolve this in code. In a one-sentence comment below this change, in your own words, explain what the error was and why it happened.

Now, examine the ART Table in the Pyret window. For the data to be considered "clean," we would want:

• Every id in the "id" column to be a unique number
• Every price in the "cost" column to be between 100 and 99,999 (inclusive)
• Every value in the "currency" column to be a valid global currency, represented as a three-letter capitalized string
• Every cell in the "kind" column to contain one of three values: "visual," "sculpture," or "other."

The next few tasks ask you to reflect on what it would mean to clean the existing data to conform to these expectations.

As you complete tasks 5-7 remember that, aside from scrolling through the columns to examine data, you can also graph the data or even sort it.

Task 5: One of the values in the "id" column appears twice, violating one of the requirements above. In a short comment that starts with "Part 2, Task 5:", name this value, and explain how to find it efficiently ("efficiently" here means faster than reading through all of the values in the column).

Task 6: In a short comment that starts with "Part 2, Task 6:", explain how the values in the "cost" column are not clean, using at least 2 specific examples from the data. Which of the approaches listed in the blue box at the top of this part would be your first choice for cleaning up the data, and why? Which would be your second choice, and what is an upside and a downside of this second choice?

Task 7: In a short comment that starts with "Part 2, Task 7:", explain how the values in the "currency" column are not clean, using 2-4 specific examples from the data. Which of the approaches listed in the blue box at the top of this part would be your first choice for cleaning up the data, and why? Which would be your second choice, and what is an upside and a downside of this second choice?

Task 8: Examine the "kind" column. We consider "visual" art to be art that has "paint" or "photo" in the "kind" description, and "sculpture" to be art that has "marble", "ceramic," or "wood" in the "kind" description (all case-insensitive). Everything else would be considered "other." Write a function called clean-kind that takes in a String (which you can assume will look like any of the values in the pre-cleaning "kind" column) and produces either "visual", "sculpture", or "other", based on the criteria named in this task. To test this task, use specific values from the given data.

Note: this task does not ask you to use transform-column to clean the ART Table, but you can (and should) certainly try out what it looks like to use clean-kind as an input to transform-column for this purpose.

Part 3: Art sales

Learning Goals:

• Practice writing functions that take tables as inputs
• Practice writing helper functions for use with tables
• Practice testing tables

Task 9: Since the given ART Table has data errors and is pretty large (and therefore unwieldy to use in test cases), come up with one small example Table with the same columns as ART. Make sure that the Table you create obey the criteria for what it means for the data to be clean, as given in Part 2. For the currency column, you can limit yourself to the following currencies (so that they match the CURRENCY-CONVERSION Table): CAD, CHF, CNY, EUR, JPY, MXN, USD, ZAR. You may end up revising this table as you work through and test the following tasks – that's okay, but make the table now as a starting point!

For the next two tasks, you can use the provided CURRENCY-CONVERSION as your test input for the relevant table, and you should use the test table you defined in Task 9.

Task 10: Create a function called get-art-price that takes in an art ID (Number), a currency (String), a Table that has the same columns as CURRENCY-CONVERSION and a Table that has the same columns as ART. This function will return a Number for the price of the artwork with the given id, converted to the input currency. You can assume that exactly one row with the given id exist in the ART-like input table. This means that you do not have to test for an art ID that does not exist in the table. However, if a direct or inverse conversion doesn't exist (as described in Task 2), this function should raise("unable to convert price"). Remember to make a plan for this task before starting to code it up!

Questions to ask when coming up with a plan

• What information will you need from the art table? From the currency table?
• What information is common to the two tables?

Task 11: You want to find the priciest art in the Table, but since the artworks are in different currencies, you will need to convert all of the artwork to the same currency to do this analysis. Create a function called priciest-art that takes in a target currency (String), a Table that has the same columns as CURRENCY-CONVERSION, and a Table that has the same columns as ART, and returns the artwork ID (Number) that costs the most once all artworks have been converted to the target currency. You can assume that all conversions to the given currency exist (either as direct or inverse conversions) in the input currency conversion table. Remember to make a plan for this task before starting to code it up!

Note: this means that you will have to examine CURRENCY-CONVERSION to find such currencies when you are testing your function in order to obey this assumption.

Part 4: Designing Datasets

Learning Goals:

• Practice designing and interacting with datasets for different purposes/users
• Think about how table designs and datasets can fail to represent all cases

Task 12: Highland Cow LCC would like to create a table that will store names. Users of the table will add rows to the table with data. Create a table to store information about names and store 3-5 names within the table. It’s up to you to decide what sorts of column(s) you’ll use for this table.

Task 13: Read this article. In your code file, copy-paste the following function:

fun last-name(name :: String) -> String:
  doc: "Returns the last name from the given name"
  space-index = string-index-of(name, " ")
  string-substring(name, space-index + 1, string-length(name))
where:
  last-name("Angus McMoo") is "McMoo"
end

based on the article, add 4 different examples in the where-block that would fail on this function, and include a brief comment about why each one fails. You are not modifying the function, so the tests you write should all show up as failing in the Pyret window. If the function should produce an error for some name, you can indicate that with a raises. For example,last-name(“Cher”) raises “No last name!” # Cher does not have a last name

Now, in your hw4-src.pdf file,

• Identify any assumptions that the structure of your table (i.e. your choice of columns) does not account for. Provide two example names that would not fit into your table.
• Explain one modification you would make to the structure of your table to allow for more names to be stored in the table. Would it affect how current names are stored? What are the downsides of this new choice?

Task 14: While the design of a dataset embodies certain assumptions, no dataset can be perfectly representative due to limitations with data collection and data storage. Consider the following groups who are interested in using a name dataset.

• Mootube is a video sharing platform currently designing a version of their platform targeted toward kids, called MootubeCalves. They would like to use the name table to display names in comments.
• Mailcattle is an email marketing company. They would like to use the name table to send personalized emails to customers.
• AngusAnalysis is a data analytics research group that is keeping track of how frequently celebrities are mentioned on social media. They would like to use the name table to store the names of celebrities they are tracking.

In hw4-src.pdf, answer the following questions for the groups:

• What information does the group need from a user to accomplish their task? Think columns in a table, such as full name, first name, last name, preferred name… what else?)
• Are there any relevant assumptions in play? Based on how the data is being used, is there anything important to allow / disallow? Who is included in the dataset, and who would be excluded?

Check Block (Autograder Compatibility)

Hit "Run", then paste this check block into the interactions window. All the tests should pass: if they don't, this means you have a typo in a function header and the autograder won't run on your code!

​​check "functions exist and have correct inputs": 
​​  CLEAN-ART = table: id, cost, currency, kind
​​    row: 1, 1, "USD", "other"
​​  end
​​  is-number(exchange-price-1(CURRENCY-CONVERSION, "USD", "EUR", 1)) is true
​​  is-number(exchange-price-2(CURRENCY-CONVERSION, "USD", "EUR", 1)) is true
​​  is-image(plot-exchange-rates(CURRENCY-CONVERSION, "USD")) is true
​​  is-string(clean-kind("")) is true
​​  is-number(get-art-price(1, "USD", CURRENCY-CONVERSION, CLEAN-ART)) is true
​​  is-number(priciest-art("USD", CURRENCY-CONVERSION, CLEAN-ART)) is true
​​end

If you see the block below appear in the interactions window after running it, then you are fine! Please submit to Gradescope.

If not, double-check your function names, input types, and input order. If you are stuck at any point, please feel free to come to hours or post on Ed!

Handin

• Download your code file and make sure it is called hw4-code.arr.
• Your written answers should be clearly marked with corresponding task numbers. Download or save your written file and make sure it is a PDF called hw4-src.pdf. If your written file is not a PDF, we might not be able to grade it.
• Hand in hw4-code.arr and `hw4-src.pdf' on Gradescope. Make sure you do not include your name or any other identification on your submissions!

Theme Song

Back at the Barnyard Theme Song by Nicktoons

Spotify Playlist

---

Brown University CSCI 0111 (Spring 2024)