counting the unique items in a numpy array: why is scipy.stats.itemfreq so slow?

Question

I'm trying to count the unique values in a numpy array.

import numpy as np
from collections import defaultdict
import scipy.stats
import time

x = np.tile([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10],20000)
for i in [44,22,300,403,777,1009,800]:
    x[i] = 11

def getCounts(x):
    counts = defaultdict(int)
    for item in x:
        counts[item] += 1
    return counts

flist = [getCounts, scipy.stats.itemfreq]

for f in flist:
    print f
    t1 = time.time()
    y = f(x)
    t2 = time.time()
    print y
    print '%.5f sec' % (t2-t1)

I couldn't find a builtin function at first to do this, so I wrote getCounts(); then I found scipy.stats.itemfreq so thought I would use that instead. But it's slow! Here's what I get on my PC. Why is it so slow compared to such a simple handwritten function?

<function getCounts at 0x0000000013C78438>
defaultdict(<type 'int'>, {1: 19998, 2: 20000, 3: 19999, 4: 19999, 5: 19999, 6: 20000, 7: 20000, 8: 19999, 9: 20000, 10: 19999, 11: 7})
0.04700 sec
<function itemfreq at 0x0000000013C5D208>
[[  1.00000000e+00   1.99980000e+04]
 [  2.00000000e+00   2.00000000e+04]
 [  3.00000000e+00   1.99990000e+04]
 [  4.00000000e+00   1.99990000e+04]
 [  5.00000000e+00   1.99990000e+04]
 [  6.00000000e+00   2.00000000e+04]
 [  7.00000000e+00   2.00000000e+04]
 [  8.00000000e+00   1.99990000e+04]
 [  9.00000000e+00   2.00000000e+04]
 [  1.00000000e+01   1.99990000e+04]
 [  1.10000000e+01   7.00000000e+00]]
2.04100 sec

Answer 1

If you can use numpy 1.9, you can use numpy.unique with the argument return_counts=True. I.e.

unique_items, counts = np.unique(x, return_counts=True)

In fact, itemfreq was updated to use np.unique, but scipy currently supports numpy versions back to 1.5, so it doesn't use the return_counts argument.

Here's the complete implementation of itemfreq in scipy 0.14:

def itemfreq(a):
    items, inv = np.unique(a, return_inverse=True)
    freq = np.bincount(inv)
    return np.array([items, freq]).T

Answer 2

First, time.time is the wrong function to use when timing, as it measures wall-clock time, not cpu time (see this question). Ideally you would use the timeit module, but time.clock is also better.

Also, it seems that you might be using an outdated version of scipy. I'm using Python 3.4 and scipy 0.14.0 and these are my timings:

x = np.tile([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10], 20000)
for i in [44, 22, 300, 403, 777, 1009, 800]:
    x[i] = 11

%timeit getCounts(x)
# 10 loops, best of 3: 55.6 ms per loop

%timeit scipy.stats.itemfreq(x)
# 10 loops, best of 3: 20.8 ms per loop

%timeit collections.Counter(x)
# 10 loops, best of 3: 39.9 ms per loop

%timeit np.unique(x, return_counts=True)
# 100 loops, best of 3: 4.13 ms per loop