Optimized method for calculating cosine distance in Python

Question

I wrote a method to calculate the cosine distance between two arrays:

def cosine_distance(a, b):
    if len(a) != len(b):
        return False
    numerator = 0
         


        

Answer 1

Similar to Darius Bacon's answer, I've been toying with operator and itertools to produce a faster answer. The following seems to be 1/3 faster on a 500-item array according to timeit:

from math import sqrt
from itertools import imap
from operator import mul

def op_cosine(a, b):
    dot_prod = sum(imap(mul, a, b))
    a_veclen = sqrt(sum(i ** 2 for i in a))
    b_veclen = sqrt(sum(i ** 2 for i in b))

    return 1 - dot_prod / (a_veclen * b_veclen)