using LINQ to find the cumulative sum of an array of numbers in C#
There's a time for generality, and there's a time for solving the problem actually posed. This is one of the latter times. If you want to make a method that turns a sequence of doubles into a sequence of partial sums, then just do that:
public static IEnumerable<double> CumulativeSum(this IEnumerable<double> sequence)
{
double sum = 0;
foreach(var item in sequence)
{
sum += item;
yield return sum;
}
}
Easy. No messing around with aggregates and complicated queries and whatnot. Easy to understand, easy to debug, easy to use:
textBox_f.Text
.Split(new char[]{','})
.Select(s => double.Parse(s))
.CumulativeSum()
.ToArray();
Now, I note that if that is user input then double.Parse can throw an exception; it might be a better idea to do something like:
public static double? MyParseDouble(this string s)
{
double d;
if (double.TryParse(s, out d))
return d;
return null;
}
public static IEnumerable<double?> CumulativeSum(this IEnumerable<double?> sequence)
{
double? sum = 0;
foreach(var item in sequence)
{
sum += item;
yield return sum;
}
}
...
textBox_f.Text
.Split(new char[]{','})
.Select(s => s.MyParseDouble())
.CumulativeSum()
.ToArray();
and now you don't get an exception if the user makes a typing mistake; you get nulls.
I had a similar requirement some time ago. Basically, I needed to do an aggregation, but I also needed to select each intermediate value. So I wrote an extension method named SelectAggregate
(probably not the most appropriate name, but I couldn't find anything better then) that can be used like that:
double[] numbers = new [] { 0.3, 0.4, 0.3 };
double[] cumulativeSums = numbers.SelectAggregate(0.0, (acc, x) => acc + x).ToArray();
Here's the code :
public static IEnumerable<TAccumulate> SelectAggregate<TSource, TAccumulate>(
this IEnumerable<TSource> source,
TAccumulate seed,
Func<TAccumulate, TSource, TAccumulate> func)
{
source.CheckArgumentNull("source");
func.CheckArgumentNull("func");
return source.SelectAggregateIterator(seed, func);
}
private static IEnumerable<TAccumulate> SelectAggregateIterator<TSource, TAccumulate>(
this IEnumerable<TSource> source,
TAccumulate seed,
Func<TAccumulate, TSource, TAccumulate> func)
{
TAccumulate previous = seed;
foreach (var item in source)
{
TAccumulate result = func(previous, item);
previous = result;
yield return result;
}
}
You want to use the Aggregate
operator, with a List<double>
as the aggregation accumulator. That way you can produce a projection which is itself a sequence of sums.
Here's an example to get you started:
double[] runningTotal = textBox_f.Text
.Split(new char[]{','})
.Select(s => double.Parse(s))
.Aggregate((IEnumerable<double>)new List<double>(),
(a,i) => a.Concat(new[]{a.LastOrDefault() + i}))
.ToArray();