TL;DR

On with TASK #2 from The Weekly Challenge #172. Enjoy!

The challenge

You are given an array of integers.

Write a script to compute the five-number summary of the given set of integers.

You can find the definition and example in the wikipedia page.

The questions

Is this the start of a new trend? Statistics?

There are a few gray areas, the most important one is about which definition to take for the percentiles. There seem to be four different ways of calculating them, depending on the inclusion and/or exclusion of stuff. I’ll stick to the so-called Tukey’s hinges way, because Tukey invented (with Cooley) the Fast Fourier Transform so he surely knew what he was doing.

He also seems to have invented the term bit. Awesome.

I’ll also disregard corner cases with very little info etc.

The solution

OK let’s start with Perl.

We define a helper function to calculate the median and also provide us back with the upper extreme of the lower half, as well as the lower extreme of the upper half. All these values are really needed only upon the first call (to evaluate the median), but whatever.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use v5.24;
use warnings;
use experimental 'signatures';
no warnings 'experimental::signatures';

my @values = (0, 0, 1, 2, 63, 61, 27, 13);
my @fives = five_number_summary(@values);
say "(@fives)";

sub five_number_summary (@input) {
   state $emedian = sub ($aref, $from, $to) {
      my $twom = $from + $to;
      my $rem  = $twom % 2;
      my $lo = ($twom - $rem) / 2;
      my $hi = $lo + 1;
      my $medn = $rem ? ($aref->[$lo] + $aref->[$hi]) / 2 : $aref->[$lo];

      # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartile - Tukey's hinges
      return ($medn, $rem ? ($lo, $hi) : ($lo, $lo));
   };
   @input = sort { $a <=> $b } @input;

   my ($median, $lo, $hi) = $emedian->(\@input, 0, $#input);
   my ($lop) = $emedian->(\@input, 0, $lo);
   my ($hip) = $emedian->(\@input, $hi, $#input);

   return ($input[0], $lop, $median, $hip, $input[-1]);
}

In pure spirit of reuse, the Raku version is copied almost verbatim. I didn’t want to venture into finding the equivalent of the state $emedian, so I just put a sub and close upon the outer sub to get the @input data. Apart from this, there’s no difference with respect to the Perl version.

#!/usr/bin/env raku
use v6;
sub MAIN {
   my @values = (0, 0, 1, 2, 63, 61, 27, 13);
   my @fives = five-number-summary(@values);
   say @fives;
}

sub five-number-summary (*@input) {
   sub emedian ($from, $to) {
      my $twom = $from + $to;
      my $rem  = $twom % 2;
      my $lo = ($twom - $rem) / 2;
      my $hi = $lo + 1;
      my $medn = $rem ?? (@input[$lo] + @input[$hi]) / 2 !! @input[$lo];

      # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartile - Tukey's hinges
      return [$medn, $rem ?? |($lo, $hi) !! |($lo, $lo)];
   }
   @input = @input.sort: { $^a <=> $^b };

   my ($median, $lo, $hi) = emedian(0, @input.end);
   my ($lop) = emedian(0, $lo);
   my ($hip) = emedian($hi, @input.end);

   return [@input[0], $lop, $median, $hip, @input[*-1]];
}

That’s all for today… stay safe!