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Defining Zhang's metric

In general, when we want to perform a task many times, we'll write a function, rather than coding up each individual instance. In this exercise, we'll define a function for Zhang's metric that takes an antecedent and consequent and outputs the metric itself. When the problems we solve become increasingly complicated in the following chapter, having a convenient means of computing a metric will greatly simplify things.

Note that numpy has been imported as np and pandas has been imported as pd. Additionally, recall that the expression for Zhang's metric in terms of support calculations is the following:

$$Zhang(A \rightarrow B) = $$ $$\frac{Support(A \& B) - Support(A) Support(B)}{ max[Support(AB) (1-Support(A)), Support(A)(Support(B)-Support(AB))]}$$

This is a part of the course

“Market Basket Analysis in Python”

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Exercise instructions

  • Define the support values of the antecedent and consequent individually.
  • Define the support of {antecedent, consequent}.
  • Complete the expressions for the numerator and denominator.
  • Complete the expression for Zhang's metric.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Define a function to compute Zhang's metric
def zhang(antecedent, consequent):
	# Compute the support of each book
	supportA = antecedent.____
	supportC = consequent.____

	# Compute the support of both books
	supportAC = np.____(antecedent, consequent).____

	# Complete the expressions for the numerator and denominator
	numerator = supportAC - supportA*supportC
	denominator = ___(supportAC*(1-supportA), supportA*(supportC-supportAC))

	# Return Zhang's metric
	return numerator / denominator
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