aos 0.0.1

A shape language for arbitrary data

And-Or Shape (aos) Language

Writing data pipelines involves doing complex data transformations over nested data, e.g., list of dictionaries or dictionary of tensors.

• The shape of nested data is not explicit in code and hence not accessible readily to the developer.
• Leads to cognitive burden (guessing shapes), technical debt and inadvertent programming errors.
• Data pipelines are very opaque to examination and comprehension.

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aos is a unified, compact language for describing the shapes of both homogeneous (tensors) and heterogeneous (dictionaries) data, and combinations, independent of the specific data library.

• Based on a well-defined (Boolean-like) algebra of data shapes.

• Allows writing explicit data shapes, inline in code. In Python, use type annotations.

• Validate concrete data against aos shapes anywhere via assertions.

• Write shapes for a variety of data conveniently -- Python native objects, tensors (numpy, pytorch, tf), pandas,hdf5,tiledb,xarray,struct-tensor, etc.

Shape of Data ?

• for scalar data, its shape is simply its type, e.g., int, float, str, ...
• for nested data, eg. list of ints: (int)*
• for a dictionary of form {'a': 3, b: 'hi'} : shape is (a & int) | (b & str).

We can describe shape of arbitrary, nested data with these &(and)- |(or) expressions. A list is an or-structure, a dictionary is an or of ands, a tensor is an and-structure, and so on.

• Why is a list an or-structure? Think of how do we access a scalar value in the list. We need to pick some value from its indices to get to a value.
• Similarly, a dictionary is an or-structure: pick one of its keys to access the sub-tree values.
• In contrast, an n-dimensional tensor has an and-shape: we must choose indices from all the dimensions of the tensor to access a scalar value.
• In general, for a data structure, we ask: what are the access paths to get to a scalar value?

Thinking in terms of and-or shapes takes a bit of practice but proves to be very useful in making hidden shapes explicit. Read more about how to think in the and-or style here.

aos Expressions

Lists over shape s are denoted as (s)*. Dictionary: (k1 & v1) | (k2 & v2) | ... | (kn & vn) where ki and vi is the ith key and value.

Pandas tables: (n & (c1|c2|...|cn)) where n is the row dimension (the number of rows) and c1,...,cn are column names.

The aos expressions let you write object shapes very compactly . For example, consider a highly nested Python object O of type

Sequence[Tuple[Tuple[str, int], Dict[str, str]]]

O's aos is simply((str|int)|(str : str))* .

Writing full shapes of data variables may get cumbersome. The language supports wildcards: _ and ... which represent a single dimension name or an arbitrary shape, respectively.

So, we could write a dictionary's shape as (k1 & ...)| ... | (kn & ...).

Shape Validation Examples

Using aos.is_aos_shape, we can write aos assertions to validate data shapes.

• The language allows lazy shape specifications using placeholders: _ matches a scalar, ... matches an arbitrary object.

from aos import is_aos_shape

def test_pyobj():
    d = {'city': 'New York', 'country': 'USA'}
    t1 = ('Google', 2001)
    t2 = (t1, d)

    is_aos_shape(t2, '(str | int) | (str & str)')

    tlist = [('a', 1), ('b', 2)]
    is_aos_shape(tlist, '(str | int)*')
    is_aos_shape(tlist, '(_ | _)*')

    is_aos_shape(t2, '(_ | _) | (str & _)*')
    is_aos_shape(t2, '... | (str & _)')

    is_aos_shape(t2, '(_ | _) | (str & int)') #error

def test_pandas():
    d =  {'id': 'CS2_056', 'cost': 2, 'name': 'Tap'}
    df = pd.DataFrame([d.items()], columns=list(d.keys()) )

    is_aos_shape(df, '1 & (id | cost | name)')

def test_numpy():
    #arr = np.array()
    arr = np.array([[1,2,3],[4,5,6]]) 
    is_aos_shape(arr, '2 & 3')

def test_pytorch():
    #arr = np.array()
    arr = torch.tensor([[1,2,3],[4,5,6]])
    is_aos_shape(arr, '2 & 3')

And-Or Shape Dimensions

The above examples of use type names (str) or integer values in shapes. A more principled approach is to first declare dimension names and define shape over these names.

Data is defined over two broad types of dimensions

• Continuous Dimensions. Think of a range of values, e.g., a numpy array of shape (5, 200) is defined over two continuous dimensions, say n and d, where n ranges over values 0-4 and d ranges over 0-199.
• Categorical Dimensions. A set of names, e.g., a dictionary {'a': 4, 'b': 5} is defined over names ['a', 'b']. One can view each key, e.g., a or b as a Singleton dimension.

The library provides an API to declare both type of dimensions and aos expressions over these dimensions, e.g., n & d.

Examples coming soon...