# Adding __name__ and __doc__ attributes to functools.partial objects

The partial function from the functools library is useful for performing partial function application in Python. There are plenty of guides and resources on functional programming in Python and this post assumes a reasonable degree of proficiency with both.

## The Problem

Consider the sum squared residuals function defined below:

def sse(X, y, w):
"""Sum squared error function"""
z = X.dot(w) - y
return .5 * z.T.dot(z)


In actual regression problems, we would minimize with respect to weights w and keep X and y fixed. For example, consider the following synthetic regression problem:

>>> import numpy as np
>>> f = lambda x, y, z: 2.*x + .5*y - 1.2*z # true weights [2., .5, -1.2]
>>> X = np.random.randn(10, 3) # 10 samples, 3 features
>>> y = f(*X.T) + .25 * np.random.randn(10) # Gaussian noise, scale 0.25
>>> sse(X, y, np.ones(3)) # try weights [1., 1., 1.]
12.013621162428603


We could partially apply X and y to the function sse, and obtain a function of only the weights w, and pass that to an optimizer, for example.

>>> from functools import partial
>>> sse_w = partial(sse, X, y)
>>> sse_w(np.ones(3)) # try weights [1., 1., 1.]
12.013621162428603


Now sse_w is a partial object which is callable and takes a single weights parameter. The only potential issue is that the __name__ and __doc__ attributes are not created automatically, i.e. for function sse defined earlier, we have

>>> sse.__name__
'sse'
>>> sse.__doc__
'Sum squared error function'


whereas for the partially applied function sse_w, we get

>>> sse_w.__name__
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'functools.partial' object has no attribute '__name__'
>>> sse_w.__doc__
'partial(func, *args, **keywords) - new function with partial application\n    of the given arguments and keywords.\n'


If we don't intend on using sse by itself later down the track, and don't need to do anything special with the __name__ and __doc__ of the partially applied version, we can simply propagate these properties from the original, using the update_wrapper function.

from functools import partial, update_wrapper

def wrapped_partial(func, *args, **kwargs):
partial_func = partial(func, *args, **kwargs)
update_wrapper(partial_func, func)
return partial_func


Now we get

>>> sse_w = wrapped_partial(sse, X, y)
>>> sse_w.__name__
'sse'
>>> sse_w.__doc__
'Sum squared error function'


so that the partially applied function looks more like the original function, since it has the metadata of the original, rather than the metadata of partial itself, which is less than helpful.

## Case Study

An actual example where missing a __name__ is a major issue is when working with libraries with interfaces that require it. For example, consider autograd - an excellent library for efficiently performing automatic differentiation.

We differentiate the sse function with respect to the weights, the 2nd parameter (counting from 0), and get:

>>> from autograd import grad
array([-3.83312179,  9.40730972,  7.11817447])


Note that we cannot differentiate partial(sse, X, y) but can differentiate wrapped_partial(sse, X, y) with no problem:

>>> grad(partial(sse, X, y))(np.ones(3))
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
AttributeError: 'functools.partial' object has no attribute '__name__'
array([-3.83312179,  9.40730972,  7.11817447])


In this case, autograd obviously makes use of the __name__ attribute of a given function to attach a name and docstring of its own:

>>> grad(sse, argnum=2).__name__
'Gradient of function sse with respect to argument number 2. Has the same arguments as sse but the return value has type ofargument 2'
'Gradient of function sse with respect to argument number 0. Has the same arguments as sse but the return value has type ofargument 0'


Finally, we can use a gradient-based optimization method to minimize the sse with respect to weights w. We use the L-BFGS-B method from scipy.optimize with w = [1., 1., 1.] as the starting point. We get:

>>> from scipy.optimize import minimize
>>> res = minimize(sse_w, x0=np.ones(3), method='L-BFGS-B', jac=grad(sse_w))
>>> res.success
True
>>> res.nit
7
>>> res.fun
0.20607947299232429
>>> res.x
array([ 2.10921327,  0.37558212, -1.20400518])


We see that the optimization converged successfully in 7 iterations to [ 2.10921327,  0.37558212, -1.20400518], which is close to the true weights [2., .5, -1.2].

## Conclusion

By default, partial functions created from functools.partial do not inherit the __name__ and __doc__ attributes automatically. If these are required for some reason, we can either define them manually, or use the wrapped_partial we defined above to propagate these attributes from the original function.