Hi Casey,

Thanks very much for your zeal.

The table is a csv file. Actually the number of rows can be sixty thousand.

Hong

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 5:08 PM, Casey Hawthorne <caseyh@istar.ca> wrote:
Sorry, I forgot to ask an important question.

Is the table stored
in a dense format as in complete rows and complete columns
or
in a sparse table format?


>The question is more about algorithm than Haskell. But I am going to code in Haskell which I am still learning.

>Suppose I have a large table, with hundreds of columns and thousands of rows. But not every cell has a value (of String, or Int, or Double type).

>I want to shuffle the rows to maximize the number of columns whose first 100 rows have at least one number, given a list of preferred column names since there is no guarantee that every number column will have at least one number in its first 100 rows after shuffling.

>Can someone provide a good algorithm for this problem? (I do not have any background in algorithms.) You can assume I already know which columns are of Int or Double type.

--
Regards,
Casey