Final Project
COMP 250 Winter 2020
posted: Wednesday, April 8, 2020
due: Thursday, April 30, 2020 at 23:59
General Instructions
• Submission instructions
– For the final project there will not be any late days. If you are not able to submit the
project by April 30th, then the project will not be graded. We will start running the
grader on the project two days before the deadline. So, the earlier you submit more
chances you will have to know if something major is wrong with the project.
– Don’t worry if you realize that you made a mistake after you submitted : you can submit
multiple times. We encourage you to submit a first version a few days before the deadline
(computer crashes do happen and myCourses may be overloaded during rush hours).
– Please store all your files in a folder called “FinalProject”, zip the folder and submit it
to myCourses. Inside your zipped folder, there must be the following files.
∗ MyHashTable.java
∗ Twitter.java
Do not submit any other files, especially .class files. Any deviation from these
requirements may lead to lost marks
• The starter code for all the above classes is provided. You must not modify the HashPair
and the Tweet class. Note that for this project, you are NOT allowed to import any other
class besides the ones already imported for you. Any failure to comply with these rules
will give you an automatic 0.
• We have included with these instruction a tester class, which is a mini version of the final
tester used to evaluate your project. If your code fails those tests, it means that there is a
mistake somewhere. Even if your code passes those tests, it may still contain some errors.
We will test your code on a much more challenging set of examples. We therefore highly
encourage you to modify the tester class and expand it. A stress tester (to test the efficiency
of your code) will be released in a week or so.
• You will automatically get 0 if your code does not compile.
• Failure to comply with any of these rules will be penalized. If anything is unclear, it is up to
you to clarify it by asking either directly a TA during office hours, or on the discussion board
on Piazza.
• Feel free to change or delete the package statements in the starter code.
1
Your task
For this project you will write several classes to simulate searching through a Twitter-like data
base. Make sure you implement all required methods according to the instructions given below.
In addition to the required methods, you are free to add as many other private methods as you
want. Note that null keys are not allowed in the hash table. Remember that in most of scenarios
objects comparison does not use ‘==’. We highly suggest you read through the entire instructions
before you start coding. You do not necessarily have to implement the methods in the order in
which they are presented. Note also that this project is meant for you to practice first hand how
to implement a hash table as well as learning when to use it and how to exploit its properties. For
this project you want to focus on optimizing the time efficiency of your code. We do not care about
space efficiency. Enjoy coding this last project!
[70 points] The class MyHashTable has the following fields:
• An int for the number of entries stored inside the table.
• An int for the number of buckets the table has (Note that this value is initialized by the
constructor, but could change later on if the number of entries increases).
• A final double representing the maximum load factor for the hash table.
• An ArrayList of buckets used to store the entries to the table. Where each bucket is a
LinkedList of HashPairs.
Implement the following public methods in the MyHashTable class:
• The constructor MyHashTable() which takes an int as input representing the initial
capacity of the table.1 Using the input, the constructor initializes all the fields.
• A put() method that takes a key and a value as input. The method adds a HashPair
of the key and value to the hash table. If a HashPair with the key already exists in the
hash table, then you should overwrite the old value associated with the key with the new
one. This method should be O(1) on average. If in this hash table there was a previous
value associated to the given key, then the method overwrites it with the new value and
returns the old one. If there was no value associated to the given key, then the method
returns null. Remember that the load factor of the table should never be greater than
the maximum load factor stored in the appropriate field.
• A get() method which takes a key as input and returns the value associated with it. If
there is no such key in the hash table, then the method should return null. This method
should run in O(1) on average.
• A remove() method that takes a key as input and removes from the table the entry (i.e.
the HashPair) associated to this key. The method should return the value associated to
the key. If the key is not found, then the method returns null. This method should run
in O(1) on average.
1The capacity is the number of buckets in the hash table, and the initial capacity is simply the capacity at the
time the hash table is created.
2
• A rehash() method which takes no input and modifies the table so that it contains
double the number of buckets. This method should be O(m) where m is the number of
buckets in the table.2
• A keys() method which takes no input and returns an ArrayList containing all the keys
in the table. The keys in the returned ArrayList may be in any order. This method
should be O(m) where m is the number of buckets in the table.
• A values() method which takes no input and returns an ArrayList containing all the
unique values in the table. The returned ArrayList of unique values may be in any
order. This method should be O(m) where m is the number of buckets in the table.
Notice that inside this class you can also see two static methods. The method called
slowSort() is already implemented. It takes as input an object of type MyHashTable where
the values are Comparable. The method returns an ArrayList containing all the keys in the
table, sorted in descending order based on the values they map to. The time complexity of
slowSort is O(n2), where n is the number of pairs in the table. Your should implement:
• a method called fastSort which performs the same task as slowSort but with a time
complexity of O(n · log(n)). It is up to you to decide which sorting algorithm you’d like
to implement.
Finally, implement the following methods from the private nested class MyHashIterator:
• The constructor which should be O(m), where m is the number of buckets in the table.
• A hasNext() method which should be O(1) and returns true if the hash table has a
next HashPair.
• A next() method which is also O(1) and returns the next HashPair.
[30 points] Implement the following public methods inside the Twitter class. Note that you are
allowed to add as many private methods and fields as you see fit.
• The constructor Twitter() which takes as input an ArrayList of Tweets and an ArrayList
of Strings denoting the stop words. A stop word is a commonly used word that is ig-
nored by search engines. We suggest you first look at what you need to implement in the
rest of the class, before deciding how to implement the constructor. The time complexity
of this method should be O(n+m) where n is the number of tweets and m is the number
of stop words.
• A method addTweet() which takes a Tweet as input and adds it to the Twitter. This
method should be O(1).
• A method latestTweetByAuthor() which takes a String as input and returns the latest
Tweet the given author has posted. If the author has not posted any tweet, then the
method returns null. This method should be O(1).
2In the slides we mention that these methods run in O(n +m) where n is the number of entries, and m is the
number of buckets. Note that if you have a good hash function and a max load factor of 0.75, then this is equivalent
to say that the method runs in O(m).
3
• A method tweetsByDate() which takes a String as input representing a date in this
format YYYY-MM-DD. The method returns an ArrayList of Tweets containing all the
tweets posted on that given date. If there are no tweets on the given date, then the
method returns null. This method should be O(1).
• A method trendingTopics() which takes no input and returns an ArrayList of Strings
containing all the words (which are not stop words!) that appear in all the tweets of this
Twitter. The words should be ordered from most frequent to least frequent by counting
in how many tweet messages the words appear. Note that if a word appears more than
once in the same tweet, it should be counted only once. This method should be
O(n ∗ log(n)) where n is the number of tweets. Note that the idea here is that
the method would build a hash table in O(n), and then call the fastSort from
the MyHashTable class which runs in O(n ∗ log(n)). Note that tweet messages have
a limit on the number of words, so iterating through the words in a message increases
the time complexity of the method by a constant. More over this implies that the
number of unique words in a set of tweets is bounded by the number of tweets
times a constant, which means that the function that describes the maximum
number of unique words in n tweets is O(n). Here a couple of hints:
– You can find in the template an helper method called getWords which you can use
to extract an array list of words out of a message. Note that the method separate the
words based on apostrophes and space characters. Characters that are not letters
from the English alphabet are ignored. So, for instance ”@pple!” becomes ”pple”
and ”user521dg” becomes ”userdg”.
– When comparing strings make sure to ignore the case of the characters. You want
to be sure for instance not to miss stop words typed in either upper or lower case.
Words like ”HELP”, ”Help”, ”help”, and ”hElP” should all be considered as the
same word.
If you test trendingTopics with an object of type Twitter created with the list of tweets
from the HashTableTester.java and an empty list as stop words, then these are the
top four trending words: “spirit” with 16 occurrence, “a” with 15 occurrences, “that”
with 8 occurrences, and “time” with 7 occurrences.