I have 100 people and I want them to judge words as either positive or negative (e.g. 'insurance' and 'car accident'). I have a total of 100 of such words. I also want each person to do three words as I am interested in some statistical properties (i.e. seeing how well people agree).
I want assign words to people by creating three columns with the same words in each column. However, I want words to randomized in a way so that there is no repetition in any row. Randomization is obviously important as I want to avoid any bias, but it would be silly to ask the same person the same two (or worse, three) words.
So, here is the data structure that I try to achieve:
person1, word1, word65, word33;
person2, word55, word56, word44;
person3, word23, word23, word3; <--- This should not happen
Is there a simple formula or other way to do this form of column-spanning randomization without repetition in LibreOffice Calc or Excel?
Thanks in advance!
What you need is a random permutation of the words that you type in difference cells. You can do this task using the Libreoffice extension Permutate! (download here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/permutate/). Since I am the developer of this simple extension, please do not hesitate to ask for any clarifications.
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I am currently doing out the top 10 types of fault chart. So the user will key in what is the fault about, ex. light bulb fused. As it is free flow text box, the words may not be the same. Is there anyway to make Alteryx understand that some words may be the same, allowing me to find the top 10 types of fault. Thank you.
You have a couple of ways. You can use the Fuzzy Match tools in the Join category to sort out slight spelling mistakes. You can find Alteryx examples of Fuzzy Match on Youtube.
You can also use the Record ID followed by Text to Columns (Split to Rows based on space) to get a list of single words.
In what you are trying to do, I would advise building up a bit of a lookup table. You can then use the Find-Replace Tool to Append the Category from the lookup depending on the words that are found.
Depending on the cleanliness of your data and how different each category is will guide you as to how far down the above paths you should go.
Within excel I have a list of artists, songs, edition.
This list contains over 15000 records.
The problem is the list does contain some "duplicate" records. I say "duplicate" as they aren't a complete match. Some might have a few typo's and I'd like to fix this up and remove those records.
So for example some records:
ABBA - Mamma Mia - Party
ABBA - Mama Mia! - Official
Each dash indicates a separate column (so 3 columns A, B, C are filled in)
How would I mark them as duplicates within Excel?
I've found out about the tool Fuzzy Lookup. Yet I'm working on a mac and since it's not available on mac I'm stuck.
Any regex magic or vba script what can help me out?
It'd also be alright to see how much similar the row is (say 80% similar).
One of the common methods for fuzzy text matching is the Levenshtein (distance) algorithm. Several nice implementations of this exist here:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/4243652/1278553
From there, you can use the function directly in your spreadsheet to find similarities between instances:
You didn't ask, but a database would be really nice here. The reason is you can do a cartesian join (one of the very few valid uses for this) and compare every single record against every other record. For example:
select
s1.group, s2.group, s1.song, s2.song,
levenshtein (s1.group, s2.group) as group_match,
levenshtein (s1.song, s2.song) as song_match
from
songs s1
cross join songs s2
order by
group_match, song_match
Yes, this would be a very costly query, depending on the number of records (in your example 225,000,000 rows), but it would bubble to the top the most likely duplicates / matches. Not only that, but you can incorporate "reasonable" joins to eliminate obvious mismatches, for example limit it to cases where the group matches, nearly matches, begins with the same letter, etc, or pre-filtering out groups where the Levenschtein is greater than x.
You could use an array formula, to indicate the duplicates, and you could modify the below to show the row numbers, this checks the rows beneath the entry for any possible 80% dupes, where 80% is taken as left to right, not total comparison. My data is a1:a15000
=IF(NOT(ISERROR(FIND(MID($A1,1,INT(LEN($A1)*0.8)),$A2:$A$15000))),1,0)
This way will also look back up the list, to indicate the ones found
=SUM(IF(ISERROR(FIND(MID($A2,1,INT(LEN($A1)*0.8)),$A3:$A$15000,1)),0,1))+SUM(IF(ISERROR(FIND(MID($A2,1,INT(LEN($A2)*0.8)),$A$1:$A1,1)),0,1))
The first entry i.e. row 1 is the first part of the formula, and the last row will need the last part after the +
try this worksheet fucntions in your loop:
=COUNTIF(Range,"*yourtexttofind*")
I am working on an excel document for fuel cards at the minute and my current issue is to write in a formula for validating number plates based on UK standard plates (two letters followed by two numbers then three letters i.e. BK08JWZ). At this point in time we are not considering personal plates in this just to keep things simple.
Ideally I need excel to look at the text in the box and confirm it to an agreed layout but I am struggling to find the right formula. The plates are in column 'I' and I have already added in another column after titled 'approved plates' in column 'J'but this can be deleted if it's not needed.
Results wise, I can do this one of two ways, to either get the excel document to highlight and number plates that do not match the DVLA standard , or have a column next to the number plate column that registers a boolean response to the recognition i.e. If it is valid (true) or if not (false).
Either way the plate needs to be able to be seen as it was currently, so if there is something wrong with it, it needs to be visible, not throw up an error message.
Any help would be very welcome.
All the information on UK standard number plates are on this site:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/359317/INF104_160914.pdf
I would do it like this:
1) create a lookup sheet with data from the booklet. One column for allowed "memory tag" identiffiers (first two letters), one column for the allowed "age identiffiers" (first two numbers), and one column for allowed random letters (last three letters, full alphabet except I and Q)
2) strip spaces from the number plate for comparison
3) Use MID(numberplate,1,2), MID(numberplate,3,2) and MID(numberplate,5,3) to compare to each lookup list repectively (using INDEX()>0).
4) when all 3 parts are found in lookup lists the number plate is valid.
Try researching Regular Expressions or RegEx. This is a powerful programming tool to determine whether strings match specific patterns. You can use RegEx expressions to extract the pattern, replace the pattern or test for the pattern. Very efficient but not for the faint-hearted although there is plenty of help on-line. Try this article for starters.
The following RegEx may be what you need..
(?^[A-Z]{2}[0-9]{2}[A-Z]{3}$)|(?^[A-Z][0-9]{1,3}[A-Z]{3}$)|(?^[A-Z]{3}[0-9]{1,3}[A-Z]$)|(?^[0-9]{1,4}[A-Z]{1,2}$)|(?^[0-9]{1,3}[A-Z]{1,3}$)|(?^[A-Z]{1,2}[0-9]{1,4}$)|(?^[A-Z]{1,3}[0-9]{1,3}$)
This was copied from this article which gives a very full explanation using DVLA rules.
EDIT:
To use RegEx within Excel. In the IDE, Tools menu, select References and add the Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions 5.5 reference.
With acknowlegement to user3616725s helpful observation.
Suppose I have a list of two-word pairs in a column in Excel. These words are delimited by a space so that a typical pair might look like "extreme happiness". The goal is to search for these 'bigrams' in a larger string located in another column. The issue is that the bigram will only be found if the two words are together and separated by a space. What would be preferable is if Excel could look for both words anywhere in a given larger string. It is crucial that the bigrams occupy one cell each since a score is assigned to each bigram and in fact the function used VLOOKUPs this value based on the bigram cell value. Would it make sense to change the space between any two words to a - or some other character? Is there a way to have Excel look up each value one at a time (perhaps by recognizing this character and passing through the larger string twice, that is, once for each word)?
Example: "The weather last night was extremely cold, but the warm fire gave me some happiness."
Here we would like to find both the word 'extreme' within the word extremely and the word happiness. Currently Excel would not be successful in doing this since it would just look for "extreme happiness" and determine that no such string exists.
If the bigram in the row below "extreme happiness" reads "weather gave" (for some reason) Excel will go check whether that bigram exists in the larger string and return a second score. This is done so that at the end every score can be added together.
This is pretty easy with a couple of formulas. See screenshot below:
The logic is simple. Assuming your bigram is in B1, we can input the following in C1. This will replace the spaces with *, which is Excel's wildcard character.
=SUBSTITUTE(B2," ","*")
Then we concatenate it to give us a wildcarded beginning and end.
=CONCATENATE("*",SUBSTITUTE(B2," ","*"),"*")
We then use a simple COUNTIF against the statement (here in A1) to return to us a count of occurence.
=COUNTIF(A2,CONCATENATE("*",SUBSTITUTE(B2," ","*"),"*"))
A simple IF check enclosing the above, with condition >0, can be used to give us either Yes or No.
=IF(COUNTIF(A2,CONCATENATE("*",SUBSTITUTE(B2," ","*"),"*"))>0,"Yes","No")
Let us know if this helps.
I need to write an algorithm that returns the closest match for a contact based on the name and address entered by the user. Both of these are troubling, since there are so many ways to enter a company name and address, for instance:
Company A, 123 Any Street Suite 200, Anytown, AK 99012
Comp. A, 123 Any St., Suite 200, Anytown, AK 99012
CA, 123 Any Street Ste 200, Anytown, AK 99012
I have looked at doing a Levenshtein distance on the Name, but that doesn't seem a great tool, since they could abbreviate the name. I am looking for something that matches on the most information possible.
My initial attempt was to limit the results first by the first 5 digits of the postal code and then try to filter down to one based on other information, but there must be a more standard approach to getting this done. I am working in .NET but will look at any code you can provide to get an idea on how to accomplish this.
I don't exactly now how this is accomplished, but all major delivery companies (FedEx, USPS, UPS) seem to have a way of matching an address you input against their database and transforming it to a normalized form. As I've seen this happen on multiple websites (Amazon comes to mind), I am assuming that there is an API to this functionality, but I don't know where to look for it and whether it is suitable for your purposes.
Just a thought though.
EDIT: I found the USPS API
I have solved this problem with a combination of address normalization, Metaphone, and Levenshtein distance. You will need to separate the name from the address since they have different characteristics. Here are the steps you need to do:
1) Narrow down you list of matches by using the (first six characters of the) zip code. Basically you will need to calculate the Levenshtein distance of the two strings and select the ones that have a distance of 1 or 2 at the most. You can potentially precompute a table of zip codes and their "Levenshtein neighbors" if you really need to speed up the search.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance
2) Convert all the address abbreviations to a standard format using the list of official prefix and suffix abbreviations from the USPS. This will help make sure your results for the next step are more uniform:
https://www.usps.com/send/official-abbreviations.htm
3) Convert the address to a short code using the Methaphone algorithm. This will get rid of most common spelling mistakes. Just make sure that your implementation can eliminate all non word characters, pass numbers intact and handle multiple words (make sure each word is separated by a single space):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone
4) Once you have the Methaphone result of the compare the address strings using the Levenshtein distance. Calculate a percentage of change score by dividing the result by the number of characters in the longer string.
5) Repeat steps 3 and 4 but now use the names instead of the addresses.
6) Compute the score for each entry using this formula: (Weight for address * Address score) + (Weight for name * Name score). Pick your weights based on what is more important. I would start with .9 for the address (since the address is more specific) and .1 for the name but the weights may depend on your application. Pick the entry with the lowest score. If the score is too high (say over .15 you may declare that there are no matches).
I think filtering based on zip code first would be the easiest, as finding it is fairly unambiguous. From there you can probably extract the city and street. I'm not sure how you would go about finding the name, but it seems matching it against the address if you already have a database of (name, address) pairs is feasible.
Dun & Bradstreet do this. They charge money because it's really hard. There's no "standard" solution. It's mostly a painful choice between a service like D&B or roll your own.
As a start, I'd probably do a word-indexed search. That would mean two stages:
Offline stage: Generate an index of all the addresses by their keywords. For example, "Company", "A" and "123" would all become an keywords for the address you provided above. You could do some stemming, which would mean for words like "street" you'd also add a word "st" into its index.
Online stage: The user gives you a search query. Break down the search query into all its keywords, and find all possible matches of each keyword in the database. Tally the number of matched keywords on each address. Then sort the results by the number of matched keywords. This should be able to be done quite quickly if there aren't too many matches, as its just a few sorted list merges and increments, followed finally by a sort.
Given that you know the domain of your problem, you could specialise the algorithm to use knowledge about the domain - for example the zip code filtering mentioned before.
Also just to enable me to provide you with a better answer, are you using an SQL database at all? I ask because the way I would do it is I'd store the keyword index in the SQL database, and then the SQL query to search by keyword becomes quite easy, since the database does all the work.
Maybe instead of using Levenshtein for the name only, it could be useful when used with the entire string representation of a contact. For instance, the distance of your first example to the second is 7 and to the third 9. Considering the strings have lengths 54, 50 and 45, this seems to be a relatively useful and quite simple similarity measure.
This is what I would do. I am not aware of algorithms, so I just use what makes sense.
I am assuming that the person would provide name, street address, city name, state name, and zipcode.
If the zipcode is provided in 9 numbers, or has a hyphen, I would strip it down to 5 numbers. I would search the database for all of the addresses that has that zipcode.[query 1]
Then I would compare the state letter with the one from the database. If it's not a match, then I would tell that to the user. Same goes for the city name.
From what I understand, a street name is not in numbers, only the house on a street had numbers in it. Further more, the house number is usually at the beginning unless it is house or suite number.
So I would do regex to search for the numbers and the next space or comma next to it. Then find position of the first word that does not has a period(.) or ends in comma. I have part of the street name, so I could do a comparison against the rows fetched earlier, or I would change the query to have the street name LIKE %streetName%.
I am guessing the database has a beginning number and ending number of the house on a block. I would check against that street row to see if the provided street number is on that street.
By now you would know the correct data to show, and could look up in a different table as to which name is associated with that house number. I am not sure why you want to compare it. Only use for name comparing would be if you want to find people whose address was not provided. You can look here for comparing string ways Similar String algorithm
If you can reliably figure out general structure of each address (perhaps by the suggestions in the other answers), your best bet would be to run the data through a USPS-certified (meaning: the results are reliable, accurate, and conform to federal standards) address verification service.
#RyanDelucchi, it is a fun problem, but only once you've solved it. So, #SteveBering, I would recommend submitting your list of contacts to a list processing service which will flag duplicates based on the address -- according to USPS guidelines.
Since I work in the address verification field, I would suggest SmartyStreets (which I work for) since it will deliver the most value to your specific need -- however, there are a few CASS-Certified vendors who will do basically similar things.