Pandas filtering for multiple substrings in series

Question

I need to filter rows in a pandas dataframe so that a specific string column contains at least one of a list of provided substrings. The substrings may have unu

Answer 1

You could try using the Aho-Corasick algorithm. In the average case, it is O(n+m+p) where n is length of the search strings and m is the length of the searched text and p is the number of output matches.

The Aho-Corasick algorithm is often used to find multiple patterns (needles) in an input text (the haystack).

pyahocorasick is a Python wrapper around a C implementation of the algorithm.

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Let's compare how fast it is versus some alternatives. Below is a benchmark showing using_aho_corasick to be over 30x faster than the original method (shown in the question) on a 50K-row DataFrame test case:

|                    |     speed factor | ms per loop |
|                    | compared to orig |             |
|--------------------+------------------+-------------|
| using_aho_corasick |            30.7x |         140 |
| using_regex        |             2.7x |        1580 |
| orig               |             1.0x |        4300 |

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In [89]: %timeit using_ahocorasick(col, lst)
10 loops, best of 3: 140 ms per loop

In [88]: %timeit using_regex(col, lst)
1 loop, best of 3: 1.58 s per loop

In [91]: %timeit orig(col, lst)
1 loop, best of 3: 4.3 s per loop

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Here the setup used for the benchmark. It also verifies that the output matches the result returned by orig:

import numpy as np
import random
import pandas as pd
import ahocorasick
import re

random.seed(321)

def orig(col, lst):
    mask = np.logical_or.reduce([col.str.contains(i, regex=False, case=False) 
                                 for i in lst])
    return mask

def using_regex(col, lst):
    """https://stackoverflow.com/a/48590850/190597 (Alex Riley)"""
    esc_lst = [re.escape(s) for s in lst]
    pattern = '|'.join(esc_lst)
    mask = col.str.contains(pattern, case=False)
    return mask

def using_ahocorasick(col, lst):
    A = ahocorasick.Automaton(ahocorasick.STORE_INTS)
    for word in lst:
        A.add_word(word.lower())
    A.make_automaton() 
    col = col.str.lower()
    mask = col.apply(lambda x: bool(list(A.iter(x))))
    return mask

N = 50000
# 100 substrings of 5 characters
lst = [''.join([chr(random.randint(0, 256)) for _ in range(5)]) for _ in range(100)]

# N strings of 20 characters
strings = [''.join([chr(random.randint(0, 256)) for _ in range(20)]) for _ in range(N)]
# make about 10% of the strings match a string from lst; this helps check that our method works
strings = [_ if random.randint(0, 99) < 10 else _+random.choice(lst) for _ in strings]

col = pd.Series(strings)

expected = orig(col, lst)
for name, result in [('using_regex', using_regex(col, lst)),
                     ('using_ahocorasick', using_ahocorasick(col, lst))]:
    status = 'pass' if np.allclose(expected, result) else 'fail'
    print('{}: {}'.format(name, status))