clustring

clustring

Sort groups of strings into buckets.

Inspired by OpenRefine's clustering.

API

The unit of analysis is a bucket. It looks like this:

const bucket = {
	"commonWord": 3,
	"CommonWord": 20,
	"SuperRareWord": 1
}

Binning

strcluster can break your bucket into bins by computing a bin key for each string. Here's a code sample, using the bucket from above:

import { clusterByKey } from 'clustring'
import fingerprint from 'clustring/key/fingerprint'

const bins = clusterByKey(bucket, fingerprint())
// bins is:
// [
//   {
//     "name": "CommonWord",
//     "key": "commonword",
//     "count": 23,
//     "bucket": { "commonWord": 3, "CommonWord": 20 }
//   },
//   {
//     "name": "SuperRareWord",
//     "key": "superrareword",
//     "count": 1,
//     "bucket": { "SuperRareWord": 1}
//   }
// ]

KNN

strcluster can also break your bucket into bins using a distance function to compare two strings.

Distance functions aren't cheap. A block-based approach avoids comparisons by grouping strings into "blocks" that all contain the same N sequence of characters. (Effectively, this skips comparisons by assuming infinite distance if there is no such sequence).

Here's some sample code:

import { clusterByKnn } from 'clustring'
import levenshtein from 'clustring/knn/levenshtein'

const bins = clusterByKnn(bucket, levenshtein(2), { blockSize: 5 })
// bins will be same as in previous example.

Developing

npm install
npm test -- --watch             # runs tests continuously
npm run-script build -- --watch # builds continuously

Pick a feature; write a test; make it pass; commit.

Deploying

1. Update version in package.json
2. npm publish