Re: Some advice required [OT]

[Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>]

On Mon, 27 Dec 2021 10:24:21 -0800 (PST), Laurent <lutgenl@icloud.com>
declaimed the following:

>
>Yes those are the cases which are annoying me.
>
>That's why I came up withe idea of multiplying the value of the result (S=1, I=2 and R=3) with the position of the value. 
>Tried it with triplets but there will still be cases where different results will give the same numeric value.
>Ignoring empty cells for the moment.
>
	Multiplying by column position inherently gives priority to the column
with the highest position. If the columns are, of themselves, not
significant, your algorithm needs to ignore column (reordering the columns
should not make a change in final selection). You could just about as
easily do a multi-column sort giving priority to the most significant
column.

>Strain F: SSR (1*1+2*1+3*3) =12 and Strain G: RRS (1*3+ 2*3+3*1) = 12 will be the same numerical value but they are different resistance profiles
>I would in this case keep both.

	So far as I can make out -- ANY collision qualifies as "different
resistance profiles".  In that example, the count of Ss vs the count of Rs
differ, but...

>The results are way longer than only 3 values so the possibilities for collisions are higher.
>
>R	R	R	R	R	S	R	R	R	S	S	S	R	S	S  => numeric:1812180608
>R	R	R	R	R	S	R	R	R	R	S	S	S	S	S  => numeric:1812180806
>
>I have to keep both and that was an easy one. Only 2 to compare not 5.
>

	In this example the count of Ss and count of Rs is the same between the
two. And, again, you've applied an arbitrary ranking of the columns
(changing the order of the columns will tend to produce wildly different
sums).

>Yes there is a hierarchy in the drugs but that information is not available in the exported results I work with.

	In that situation I would complain to the provider that the exported
data is incompletely defined. At the very least, the columns should be in
ascending (or descending) order of significance, justifying use of column
position as a weight (even better would be to have a row of the data
containing the weight to be used for a given column, which makes the column
order irrelevant).


-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
	wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/