Better fuzzy matching performance?

Question

I'm currently using method get_close_matches method from difflib to iterate through a list of 15,000 strings to get the closest match against another list of approx 15,000 strings:

a=['blah','pie','apple'...]
b=['jimbo','zomg','pie'...]

for value in a:
    difflib.get_close_matches(value,b,n=1,cutoff=.85)

It takes .58 seconds per value which means it will take 8,714 seconds or 145 minutes to finish the loop. Is there another library/method that might be faster or a way to improve the speed for this method? I've already tried converting both arrays to lower case, but it only resulted in a slight speed increase.

Answer 1

fuzzyset indexes strings by their bigrams and trigrams so it finds approximate matches in O(log(N)) vs O(N) for difflib. For my fuzzyset of 1M+ words and word-pairs it can compute the index in about 20 seconds and find the closest match in less than a 100 ms.