[Numpy-discussion] Find the N maximum values and corresponding indexes in an array

[Keith Goodman]

On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Neal Becker <ndbecker2@gmail.com> wrote:
> David Warde-Farley wrote:
>
>> On 2-Dec-09, at 6:55 PM, Howard Chong wrote:
>>
>>> def myFindMaxA(myList):
>>>    """implement finding maximum value with for loop iteration"""
>>>    maxIndex=0
>>>    maxVal=myList[0]
>>>    for index, item in enumerate(myList):
>>>        if item[0]>maxVal:
>>>            maxVal=item[0]
>>>            maxIndex=index
>>>    return [maxIndex, maxVal]
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> My question is: how can I make the latter version run faster? I
>>> think the
>>> answer is that I have to do the iteration in C.
>>
>>
>> def find_biggest_n(myarray, n):
>> ind = np.argsort(myarray)
>> return ind[-n:], myarray[ind[-n:]]
>>
>> David
> Not bad, although I wonder whether a partial sort could be faster.

I'm doing a lot of sorting right now. I only need to sort the lowest
30% of values in a 1d array (about 250k elements), the rest I don't
need to sort. How do I do a partial sort?