What is wrong with this python function from “Programming Collective Intelligence”?

Question

This is the function in question. It calculates the Pearson correlation coefficient for p1 and p2, which is supposed to be a number between -1 and 1.

When I use this

Answer 1

Well, I wasn't exactly able to find what's wrong with the logic in your function, so I just reimplemented it using the definition of Pearson coefficient:

from math import sqrt

def sim_pearson(p1,p2):
    keys = set(p1) | set(p2)
    n = len(keys)

    a1 = sum(p1[it] for it in keys) / n
    a2 = sum(p2[it] for it in keys) / n

#    print(a1, a2)

    sum1Sq = sum((p1[it] - a1) ** 2 for it in keys)
    sum2Sq = sum((p2[it] - a2) ** 2 for it in keys) 

    num = sum((p1[it] - a1) * (p2[it] - a2) for it in keys)
    den = sqrt(sum1Sq * sum2Sq)

#    print(sum1Sq, sum2Sq, num, den)
    return num / den

critics = {
    'user1':{
        'item1': 3,
        'item2': 5,
        'item3': 5,
        },

    'user2':{
        'item1': 4,
        'item2': 5,
        'item3': 5,
        }
}

assert 0.999 < sim_pearson(critics['user1'], critics['user1']) < 1.0001

print('Your example:', sim_pearson(critics['user1'], critics['user2']))
print('Another example:', sim_pearson({1: 1, 2: 2, 3: 3}, {1: 4, 2: 0, 3: 1}))

Note that in your example the Pearson coefficient is just 1.0 since vectors (-4/3, 2/3, 2/3) and (-2/3, 1/3, 1/3) are parallel.