permutations with unique values

Question

itertools.permutations generates where its elements are treated as unique based on their position, not on their value. So basically I want to avoid duplicates like this:

Answer 1

To generate unique permutations of ["A","B","C","D"] I use the following:

from itertools import combinations,chain

l = ["A","B","C","D"]
combs = (combinations(l, r) for r in range(1, len(l) + 1))
list_combinations = list(chain.from_iterable(combs))

Which generates:

[('A',),
 ('B',),
 ('C',),
 ('D',),
 ('A', 'B'),
 ('A', 'C'),
 ('A', 'D'),
 ('B', 'C'),
 ('B', 'D'),
 ('C', 'D'),
 ('A', 'B', 'C'),
 ('A', 'B', 'D'),
 ('A', 'C', 'D'),
 ('B', 'C', 'D'),
 ('A', 'B', 'C', 'D')]

Notice, duplicates are not created (e.g. items in combination with D are not generated, as they already exist).

Example: This can then be used in generating terms of higher or lower order for OLS models via data in a Pandas dataframe.

import statsmodels.formula.api as smf
import pandas as pd

# create some data
pd_dataframe = pd.Dataframe(somedata)
response_column = "Y"

# generate combinations of column/variable names
l = [col for col in pd_dataframe.columns if col!=response_column]
combs = (combinations(l, r) for r in range(1, len(l) + 1))
list_combinations = list(chain.from_iterable(combs))

# generate OLS input string
formula_base = '{} ~ '.format(response_column)
list_for_ols = [":".join(list(item)) for item in list_combinations]
string_for_ols = formula_base + ' + '.join(list_for_ols)

Creates...

Y ~ A + B + C + D + A:B + A:C + A:D + B:C + B:D + C:D + A:B:C + A:B:D + A:C:D + B:C:D + A:B:C:D'

Which can then be piped to your OLS regression

model = smf.ols(string_for_ols, pd_dataframe).fit()
model.summary()