Detect outlier in repeating sequence - algorithm

Question

I have a repeating sequence of say 0~9 (but may start and stop at any of these numbers). e.g.:
3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0,1,2
And it has outliers at random location, including 1st and last one, e.g.:
9,4,5,6,7,8,9,0,1,2,3,4,8,6,7,0,9,0,1,2,3,4,1,6,7,8,9,0,1,6
I need to find & correct the outliers, in the above example, I need correct the first "9" into "3", and "8" into "5", etc..
What I came up with is to construct a sequence with no outlier of desired length, but since I don't know which number the sequence starts with, I'd have to construct 10 sequences each starting from "0", "1", "2" ... "9". And then I can compare these 10 sequences with the given sequence and find the one sequence that match the given sequence the most. However this is very inefficient when the repeating pattern gets large (say if the repeating pattern is 0~99, I'd need to create 100 sequences to compare).
Assuming there won't be consecutive outliers, is there a way to find & correct these outliers efficiently?
edit: added some explanation and added the algorithm tag. Hopefully it is more appropriate now.

Answer 1

I'm going to propose a variation of #trincot's fine answer. Like that one, it doesn't care how many outliers there may be in a row, but unlike that one doesn't care either about how many in a row aren't outliers.
The base idea is just to let each sequence element "vote" on what the first sequence element "should be". Whichever gets the most votes wins. By construction, this maximizes the number of elements left unchanged: after the 1-liner loop ends, votes[i] is the number of elements left unchanged if i is picked as the starting point.
def correct(numbers, mod=None):
# this part copied from #trincot's program
if mod is None: # if argument is not provided:
# Make a guess what the range is of the values
mod = max(numbers) + 1
votes = [0] * mod
for i, x in enumerate(numbers):
# which initial number would make x correct?
votes[(x - i) % mod] += 1
winning_count = max(votes)
winning_numbers = [i for i, v in enumerate(votes)
if v == winning_count]
if len(winning_numbers) > 1:
raise ValueError("ambiguous!", winning_numbers)
winning_number = winning_numbers[0]
for i in range(len(numbers)):
numbers[i] = (winning_number + i) % mod
return numbers
Then, e.g.,
>>> correct([9,4,5,6,7,8,9,0,1,2,3,4,8,6,7,0,9,0,1,2,3,4,1,6,7,8,9,0,1,6])
[3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, 1, 2]
but
>>> correct([1, 5, 3, 7, 5, 9])
...
ValueError: ('ambiguous!', [1, 4])
That is, it's impossible to guess whether you want [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] or [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. They both have 3 numbers "right", and despite that there are never two adjacent outliers in either case.

Answer 2

I would do a first scan of the list to find the longest sublist in the input that maintains the right order. We will then assume that those values are all correct, and calculate backwards what the first value would have to be to produce those values in that sublist.
Here is how that would look in Python:
def correct(numbers, mod=None):
if mod is None: # if argument is not provided:
# Make a guess what the range is of the values
mod = max(numbers) + 1
# Find the longest slice in the list that maintains order
start = 0
longeststart = 0
longest = 1
expected = -1
for last in range(len(numbers)):
if numbers[last] != expected:
start = last
elif last - start >= longest:
longest = last - start + 1
longeststart = start
expected = (numbers[last] + 1) % mod
# Get from that longest slice what the starting value should be
val = (numbers[longeststart] - longeststart) % mod
# Repopulate the list starting from that value
for i in range(len(numbers)):
numbers[i] = val
val = (val + 1) % mod
# demo use
numbers = [9,4,5,6,7,8,9,0,1,2,3,4,8,6,7,0,9,0,1,2,3,4,1,6,7,8,9,0,1,6]
correct(numbers, 10) # for 0..9 provide 10 as argument, ...etc
print(numbers)
The advantage of this method is that it would even give a good result if there were errors with two consecutive values, provided that there are enough correct values in the list of course.
Still this runs in linear time.

Answer 3

Here is another way using groupby and count from Python's itertools module:
from itertools import count, groupby
def correct(lst):
groupped = [list(v) for _, v in groupby(lst, lambda a, b=count(): a - next(b))]
# Check if all groups are singletons
if all(len(k) == 1 for k in groupped):
raise ValueError('All groups are singletons!')
for k, v in zip(groupped, groupped[1:]):
if len(k) < 2:
out = v[0] - 1
if out >= 0:
yield out
else:
yield from k
else:
yield from k
# check last element of the groupped list
if len(v) < 2:
yield k[-1] + 1
else:
yield from v
lst = "9,4,5,6,7,8,9,0,1,2,3,4,8,6,7,0,9,0,1,2,3,4,1,6,7,8,9,0,1,6"
lst = [int(k) for k in lst.split(',')]
out = list(correct(lst))
print(out)
Output:
[3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, 1, 2]
Edit:
For the case of [1, 5, 3, 7, 5, 9] this solution will return something not accurate, because i can't see which value you want to modify. This is why the best solution is to check & raise a ValueError if all groups are singletons.

Answer 4

Like this?
numbers = [9,4,5,6,7,8,9,0,1,2,3,4,8,6,7,0,9,0,1,2,3,4,1,6,7,8,9,0,1,6]
i = 0
for n in numbers[:-1]:
i += 1
if n > numbers[i] and n > 0:
numbers[i-1] = numbers[i]-1
elif n > numbers[i] and n == 0:
numbers[i - 1] = 9
n = numbers[-1]
if n > numbers[0] and n > 0:
numbers[-1] = numbers[0] - 1
elif n > numbers[0] and n == 0:
numbers[-1] = 9
print(numbers)