sklearn: How to speed up a vectorizer (eg Tfidfvectorizer)

Question

After thoroughly profiling my program, I have been able to pinpoint that it is being slowed down by the vectorizer.

I am working on text data, and two lines of simpl

Answer 1

Unsurprisingly, it's NLTK that is slow:

>>> tfidf = StemmedTfidfVectorizer(min_df=1, stop_words='english', analyzer='word', ngram_range=(1,1))
>>> %timeit tfidf.fit_transform(X_train)
1 loops, best of 3: 4.89 s per loop
>>> tfidf = TfidfVectorizer(min_df=1, stop_words='english', analyzer='word', ngram_range=(1,1))
>>> %timeit tfidf.fit_transform(X_train)
1 loops, best of 3: 415 ms per loop

You can speed this up by using a smarter implementation of the Snowball stemmer, e.g., PyStemmer:

>>> import Stemmer
>>> english_stemmer = Stemmer.Stemmer('en')
>>> class StemmedTfidfVectorizer(TfidfVectorizer):
...     def build_analyzer(self):
...         analyzer = super(TfidfVectorizer, self).build_analyzer()
...         return lambda doc: english_stemmer.stemWords(analyzer(doc))
...     
>>> tfidf = StemmedTfidfVectorizer(min_df=1, stop_words='english', analyzer='word', ngram_range=(1,1))
>>> %timeit tfidf.fit_transform(X_train)
1 loops, best of 3: 650 ms per loop

NLTK is a teaching toolkit. It's slow by design, because it's optimized for readability.