Howto

Expanding Pandas’ CategoricalIndex: How to Add New Categories 💡 Problem Formulation: When working with pandas’ CategoricalIndex, we often encounter situations where we need to expand the index with additional categories. Consider having a pandas DataFrame with a categorical index ‘grade’ that has categories [‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’]. What if we want to add a ‘D’ grade … Read more

💡 Problem Formulation: In graph theory, a common reachable node refers to a vertex that can be accessed via paths from two or more distinct nodes. The problem this article addresses is identifying whether a graph contains such a common reachable node. Given a graph representation and a selection of starting nodes, we seek a … Read more

💡 Problem Formulation: When dealing with text data, detecting pairs of words that are nearly identical can be crucial for tasks like spell checking, plagiarism detection, or data deduplication. For instance, given a list of words [‘example’, ‘samples’, ‘exampel’, ‘apple’, ‘aple’], the program should identify pairs like (‘example’, ‘exampel’) and (‘apple’, ‘aple’) as almost the … Read more

💡 Problem Formulation: Imagine you have a matrix where each cell contains a certain number of coins. The challenge is to collect the maximum number of coins following certain rules: when you pick coins from a cell, that cell disappears (turns to 0), and you cannot pick from cells adjacent to it in any direction. … Read more

💡 Problem Formulation: Imagine the scenario where an airplane with 100 seats has passengers boarding randomly, except for the last person. This person always boards last and has a specific assigned seat. We want to calculate the probability of this last passenger ending up in their assigned seat after all preceding passengers might have taken … Read more

💡 Problem Formulation: You have a multi-core server and multiple tasks to run, each with a defined core requirement. The challenge is to write a Python program to determine if all tasks can be executed without exceeding the available server cores. For instance, given 4 server cores and tasks requiring 1,2,1, and 3 cores respectively, … Read more

💡 Problem Formulation: We are often faced with problems that require validating the output of stack-based operations. The goal is to determine the final state of a stack after performing a series of push and pop operations, with the final “answer” being the top element of the stack or some other property of the final … Read more

💡 Problem Formulation: When dealing with circular cyclic lists in Python, a common task is to determine whether a forward path exists through the sequence. A forward path implies that it is possible to traverse the list starting at one node and continue moving to successive nodes without stalling indefinitely at any point. This article … Read more

💡 Problem Formulation: In Python, counting the number of characters within nested brackets can be crucial for understanding the structure of complex expressions, code segments, or data stored in a nested format. For a given string such as “a(b(c)d(e(f)g)h)i”, we want to determine the count of characters at each bracket depth. The expected output is … Read more

💡 Problem Formulation: The task at hand involves writing a Python program that can shift each character in a string by a specified number of positions. The ‘shift’ here refers to moving a letter in the alphabet by the given number of places, wrapping around if necessary. For example, shifting the letter ‘A’ by 1 … Read more

💡 Problem Formulation: The task is to create a Python program that can count the number of ways a horizontal brick pattern can be formed using a set of bricks. Consider having bricks of different lengths, and the goal is to fill a horizontal layer of a fixed length. For example, if you have bricks … Read more

💡 Problem Formulation: We tackle the challenge of finding the total number of unique pairs in an array, such that the square of one element is less than or equal to another element within a specified range. For instance, given an array [1, 4, 6] and a range (0, 16), the desired output would be … Read more