bndlearner: bacon number distribution learner

bndlearner is a module for learning the distribution vector of the bacon number for a provided list of actors, using Google's builtin tool for looking up the bacon number of a particular actor.

Requirements

bndlearner requires the following python modules:

• requests
• bs4 (BeautifulSoup 4)
• numpy

For more information, refer to requirements.txt

Usage

First, create an object of class BNDlearner as follows: bndl = BNDlearner(maxBaconNumber, numProcs) Here, maxBaconNumber is the maximum bacon number accounted for in the distribution, and numProcs is the number of processes to run the computation on.

To then use this object to learn the distribution of the bacon number for a list of actors, make the following method call: bndl.learnBaconNumberDistribution(actors, normalize) where actors is a list of strings specifying names of actors, and normalize is a boolean specifying whether the distribution should be normalized.

To learn the distribution for a group of actors specified in a file named actorsFile, use the following syntax: bndl.learnBaconNumberDistributionFromFile(actorsFile)

The resulting distribution will both be returned, and assigned to the instance variable bndl.dist.