Random Hacks: Tag Recommended

Bayes' rule in Haskell, or why drug tests don't work

Eric Kidd — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:11:00 +0000

Part 3 of Refactoring Probability Distributions.
(Part 1: PerhapsT, Part 2: Sampling functions)

A very senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google told me that Google works and thinks at a higher level of abstraction than Microsoft. “Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement,” he said. -Joel Spolsky

I really love this quote, because it’s insanely provocative to any language designer. What would a programming language look like if Bayes’ rule were as simple as an if statement?

Let’s start with a toy problem, and refactor it until Bayes’ rule is baked right into our programming language.

Imagine, for a moment, that we’re in charge of administering drug tests for a small business. We’ll represent each employee’s test results (and drug use) as follows:

data Test = Pos | Neg
  deriving (Show, Eq)

data HeroinStatus = User | Clean
  deriving (Show, Eq)

Assuming that 0.1% of our employees have used heroin recently, and that our test is 99% accurate, we can model the testing process as follows:

drugTest1 :: Dist d => d (HeroinStatus, Test)
drugTest1 = do
  heroinStatus <- percentUser 0.1
  testResult <-
    if heroinStatus == User
      then percentPos 99
      else percentPos 1
  return (heroinStatus, testResult)

-- Some handy distributions.
percentUser p = percent p User Clean
percentPos p = percent p Pos Neg

-- A weighted distribution with two elements.
percent p x1 x2 =
  weighted [(x1, p), (x2, 100-p)]

This code is based our FDist monad, which is in turn based on PFP. Don’t worry if it seems slightly mysterious; you can think of the “<-” operator as choosing an element from a probability distribution.

Running our drug test shows every possible combination of the two variables:

> exact drugTest1
[Perhaps (User,Pos) 0.1%,
 Perhaps (User,Neg) 0.0%,
 Perhaps (Clean,Pos) 1.0%,
 Perhaps (Clean,Neg) 98.9%]

If you look carefully, we have a problem. Most of the employees who test positive are actually clean! Let’s tweak our code a bit, and try to zoom in on the positive test results.

Map fusion: Making Haskell 225% faster

Eric Kidd — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 09:55:00 +0000

Or, how to optimize MapReduce, and when folds are faster than loops

Purely functional programming might actually be worth the pain, if you care about large-scale optimization.

Lately, I’ve been studying how to speed up parallel algorithms. Many parallel algorithms, such as Google’s MapReduce, have two parts:

First, you transform the data by mapping one or more functions over each value.
Next, you repeatedly merge the transformed data, “reducing” it down to a final result.

Unfortunately, there’s a couple of nasty performance problems lurking here. We really want to combine all those steps into a single pass, so that we can eliminate temporary working data. But we don’t always want to do this optimization by hand—it would be better if the compiler could do it for us.

As it turns out, Haskell is an amazing testbed for this kind of optimization. Let’s build a simple model, show where it breaks, and then crank the performance way up.

Trees, and the performance problems they cause

We’ll use single-threaded trees for our testbed. They’re simple enough to demonstrate the basic idea, and they can be generalized to parallel systems. (If you want know how, check out the papers at the end of this article.)

A tree is either empty, or it is a node with a left child, a value and a right child:

data Tree a = Empty
            | Node (Tree a) a (Tree a)
  deriving (Show)

Here’s a sample tree containing three values:

tree = (Node left 2 right)
  where left  = (Node Empty 1 Empty)
        right = (Node Empty 3 Empty)

We can use treeMap to apply a function to every value in a tree, creating a new tree:

treeMap :: (a -> b) -> Tree a -> Tree b

treeMap f Empty = Empty
treeMap f (Node l x r) =
  Node (treeMap f l) (f x) (treeMap f r)

Using treeMap, we can build various functions that manipulate trees:

-- Double each value in a tree.
treeDouble tree = treeMap (*2) tree

-- Add one to each value in a tree.
treeIncr tree   = treeMap (+1) tree

What if we want to add up all the values in a tree? Well, we could write a simple recursive sum function:

treeSum Empty = 0
treeSum (Node l x r) =
  treeSum l + x + treeSum r

But for reasons that will soon become clear, it’s much better to refactor the recursive part of treeSum into a reusable treeFold function (“fold” is Haskell’s name for “reduce”):

treeFold f b Empty = b
treeFold f b (Node l x r) =
  f (treeFold f b l) x (treeFold f b r)

treeSum t = treeFold (\l x r -> l+x+r) 0 t

Now we can double all the values in a tree, add 1 to each, and sum up the result:

treeSum (treeIncr (treeDouble tree))

But there’s a very serious problem with this code. Imagine that we’re working with a million-node tree. The two calls to treeMap (buried inside treeIncr and treeDouble) will each create a new million-node tree. Obviously, this will kill our performance, and it will make our garbage collector cry.

Fortunately, we can do a lot better than this, thanks to some funky GHC extensions.

Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP

Eric Kidd — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 11:30:00 +0000

Years ago, I looked at Ruby and decided to ignore it. Ruby wasn’t as popular as Python, and it wasn’t as powerful as LISP. So why should I bother?

Of course, we could turn those criteria around. What if Ruby were more popular than LISP, and more powerful than Python? Would that be enough to make Ruby interesting?

Before answering this question, we should decide what makes LISP so powerful. Paul Graham has written eloquently about LISP’s virtues. But, for the sake of argument, I’d like to boil them down to two things:

LISP is a dense functional language.
LISP has programmatic macros.

As it turns out, Ruby compares well as a functional language, and it fakes macros better than I’d thought.

McCarthy's Ambiguous Operator

Eric — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 1961, John McCarthy (the inventor of LISP) described an interesting mathematical operator called amb. Essentially, amb hates to be called with no arguments, and can look into the future to keep that from happening. Here's how it might look in Ruby.

The Missing Future

Eric — Sun, 22 Jun 2003 00:00:00 +0000

I'm a 27-year-old programmer. When I'm 55--in 2031--I want to still be a programmer. And in 2031, I want to love my job as much as I do today. What will 2031 look like? Right now, two groups are offering their visions for the future: Microsoft and the open source movement. A third group is conspicuously silent: small, independent developers. What do the Microsoft and open source futures look like? Will the independent developers speak up? Which future should I fight for? My choices, and the choices of hundreds of thousands of people like me, will help determine which future we get. So let's take a look and start talking.

Lightweight Languages 2 Conference

Eric — Sun, 10 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

This Saturday, I attended the LL2 conference at MIT. LL2 is dedicated to "lightweight" programming languages, a delibrately loose category including (1) any pleasant, easy-to-use scripting language and (2) any academic language which makes it easier to prototype and write software quickly. LL2 is a small, informal workshop with audience participation. The attendees are a diverse bunch, and enjoy goring each other's sacred cows. You have been warned.

Bayesian Whitelisting: Finding the Good Mail Among the Spam

Eric — Sun, 29 Sep 2002 00:00:00 +0000

The biggest challenge with spam filtering is reducing false positives--that is, finding the good mail among the spam. Even the best spam filters occasionally mistake legitimate e-mail for spam. For example, in some recent tests, bogofilter processed 18,000 e-mails with only 34 false positives. Unfortunately, several of these false positives were urgent e-mails from former clients. This unpleasant mistake wasn't necessary--the most important of these false positives could have been avoided with an automatic whitelisting system.

How To Test a Trainable Spam Filter

Eric — Sun, 22 Sep 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since Paul Graham published A Plan for Spam, "trainable" spam filters have become the latest fashion. These filters train themselves to know the characteristics of your personal e-mail. Supposedly, this extra knowledge allows them to make fewer mistakes, and makes them harder to fool. But do these filters actually work? In this article, I try out Eric Raymond's bogofilter, a trainable Bayesian spam filter, and describe the steps required to evaluate such a filter accurately.

Why Hygienic Macros Rock

Eric — Fri, 13 Sep 2002 00:00:00 +0000

I've recently been reading a lot of excellent essays on programming language design by Paul Graham. Paul and I agree about a number of things: (1) LISP is beautiful and powerful family of languages, even by modern standards, (2) all existing dialects of LISP are lacking a certain something, and (3) programmatic macros are a Good Idea.