[SciPy-Dev] splitting an ordered list as evenly as possilbe

[Keith Goodman]

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 7:19 AM, John Hunter <jdh2358 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 9:10 AM, Keith Goodman <kwgoodman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> How about using the percentiles of np.unique(x)? That takes care of
>> the first constraint (no overlap) but ignores the second constraint
>> (min std of cluster size).
>
> Well, I need the 2nd constraint....

Both can't be hard constraints, so I guess the first step is to define
a utility function that quantifies the trade off between the two.
Would it make sense to then start from the percentile(unique(x), ...)
solution and come up with a heuristic that moves an item with lots of
repeats in a large length quintile to a short lenght quintile and then
accept the moves if it improves the utility? Or try moving each item
to each of the other 4 quintiles and do the move the improves the
utility the most. Then repeat until the utility doesn't improve. But I
guess I'm just stating the obvious and you are looking for something
less obvious and more clever.