List Highest Correlation Pairs from a Large Correlation Matrix in Pandas?

Question

How do you find the top correlations in a correlation matrix with Pandas? There are many answers on how to do this with R (Show correlations as an ordered list, not as a lar

Answer 1

The following function should do the trick. This implementation

• Removes self correlations
• Removes duplicates
• Enables the selection of top N highest correlated features

and it is also configurable so that you can keep both the self correlations as well as the duplicates. You can also to report as many feature pairs as you wish.

---

def get_feature_correlation(df, top_n=None, corr_method='spearman',
                            remove_duplicates=True, remove_self_correlations=True):
    """
    Compute the feature correlation and sort feature pairs based on their correlation

    :param df: The dataframe with the predictor variables
    :type df: pandas.core.frame.DataFrame
    :param top_n: Top N feature pairs to be reported (if None, all of the pairs will be returned)
    :param corr_method: Correlation compuation method
    :type corr_method: str
    :param remove_duplicates: Indicates whether duplicate features must be removed
    :type remove_duplicates: bool
    :param remove_self_correlations: Indicates whether self correlations will be removed
    :type remove_self_correlations: bool

    :return: pandas.core.frame.DataFrame
    """
    corr_matrix_abs = df.corr(method=corr_method).abs()
    corr_matrix_abs_us = corr_matrix_abs.unstack()
    sorted_correlated_features = corr_matrix_abs_us \
        .sort_values(kind="quicksort", ascending=False) \
        .reset_index()

    # Remove comparisons of the same feature
    if remove_self_correlations:
        sorted_correlated_features = sorted_correlated_features[
            (sorted_correlated_features.level_0 != sorted_correlated_features.level_1)
        ]

    # Remove duplicates
    if remove_duplicates:
        sorted_correlated_features = sorted_correlated_features.iloc[:-2:2]

    # Create meaningful names for the columns
    sorted_correlated_features.columns = ['Feature 1', 'Feature 2', 'Correlation (abs)']

    if top_n:
        return sorted_correlated_features[:top_n]

    return sorted_correlated_features

Answer 2

I was trying some of the solutions here but then I actually came up with my own one. I hope this might be useful for the next one so I share it here:

def sort_correlation_matrix(correlation_matrix):
    cor = correlation_matrix.abs()
    top_col = cor[cor.columns[0]][1:]
    top_col = top_col.sort_values(ascending=False)
    ordered_columns = [cor.columns[0]] + top_col.index.tolist()
    return correlation_matrix[ordered_columns].reindex(ordered_columns)

Answer 3

@HYRY's answer is perfect. Just building on that answer by adding a bit more logic to avoid duplicate and self correlations and proper sorting:

import pandas as pd
d = {'x1': [1, 4, 4, 5, 6], 
     'x2': [0, 0, 8, 2, 4], 
     'x3': [2, 8, 8, 10, 12], 
     'x4': [-1, -4, -4, -4, -5]}
df = pd.DataFrame(data = d)
print("Data Frame")
print(df)
print()

print("Correlation Matrix")
print(df.corr())
print()

def get_redundant_pairs(df):
    '''Get diagonal and lower triangular pairs of correlation matrix'''
    pairs_to_drop = set()
    cols = df.columns
    for i in range(0, df.shape[1]):
        for j in range(0, i+1):
            pairs_to_drop.add((cols[i], cols[j]))
    return pairs_to_drop

def get_top_abs_correlations(df, n=5):
    au_corr = df.corr().abs().unstack()
    labels_to_drop = get_redundant_pairs(df)
    au_corr = au_corr.drop(labels=labels_to_drop).sort_values(ascending=False)
    return au_corr[0:n]

print("Top Absolute Correlations")
print(get_top_abs_correlations(df, 3))

That gives the following output:

Data Frame
   x1  x2  x3  x4
0   1   0   2  -1
1   4   0   8  -4
2   4   8   8  -4
3   5   2  10  -4
4   6   4  12  -5

Correlation Matrix
          x1        x2        x3        x4
x1  1.000000  0.399298  1.000000 -0.969248
x2  0.399298  1.000000  0.399298 -0.472866
x3  1.000000  0.399298  1.000000 -0.969248
x4 -0.969248 -0.472866 -0.969248  1.000000

Top Absolute Correlations
x1  x3    1.000000
x3  x4    0.969248
x1  x4    0.969248
dtype: float64

Answer 4

Use the code below to view the correlations in the descending order.

# See the correlations in descending order

corr = df.corr() # df is the pandas dataframe
c1 = corr.abs().unstack()
c1.sort_values(ascending = False)

Answer 5

Lot's of good answers here. The easiest way I found was a combination of some of the answers above.

corr = corr.where(np.triu(np.ones(corr.shape), k=1).astype(np.bool))
corr = corr.unstack().transpose()\
    .sort_values(by='column', ascending=False)\
    .dropna()

Answer 6

I liked Addison Klinke's post the most, as being the simplest, but used Wojciech Moszczyńsk’s suggestion for filtering and charting, but extended the filter to avoid absolute values, so given a large correlation matrix, filter it, chart it, and then flatten it:

Created, Filtered and Charted

dfCorr = df.corr()
filteredDf = dfCorr[((dfCorr >= .5) | (dfCorr <= -.5)) & (dfCorr !=1.000)]
plt.figure(figsize=(30,10))
sn.heatmap(filteredDf, annot=True, cmap="Reds")
plt.show()

Function

In the end, I created a small function to create the correlation matrix, filter it, and then flatten it. As an idea, it could easily be extended, e.g., asymmetric upper and lower bounds, etc.

def corrFilter(x: pd.DataFrame, bound: float):
    xCorr = x.corr()
    xFiltered = xCorr[((xCorr >= bound) | (xCorr <= -bound)) & (xCorr !=1.000)]
    xFlattened = xFiltered.unstack().sort_values().drop_duplicates()
    return xFlattened

corrFilter(df, .7)