Ruby on Medicine: Counting Word Frequency in a File

Welcome to a new article in SitePoint's Ruby on Medicine series, where I show how the Ruby programming language can be applied to tasks related to the medical domain.

Newbie, moderate, and advanced Ruby programmers can benefit from this series, in addition to health/medical researchers and practitioners looking forward to learning the Ruby programming language, and apply it to their domain.

In this article, I'm going to show you how we can use Ruby to check the frequency of occurrence of words in some file. Counting the frequency of occurrence of words can come in handy in large text files, such as the OMIM^®^ – Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man^®^ file, which we worked with in the last article.. The reason counting the frequency of words could be beneficial is that going through the list of words and their frequencies will give us a more sense of what the document is about. It can also pinpoint any mistakes and misspellings, especially when we have a dictionary to compare against. When a word from the dictionary is not listed in your output, for instance, you can simply conclude that a misspelling has occurred to that word, or abbreviations were used rather than the words themselves.

Continue reading %Ruby on Medicine: Counting Word Frequency in a File%

by A. Hasan via SitePoint