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Most frequently overlapping range - Python3.x

I'm a beginner, trying to write code listing the most frequently overlapping ranges in a list of ranges.
So, input is various ranges (#1 through #7 in the example figure; https://prntscr.com/kj80xl) and I would like to find the most common range (in the example 3,000- 4,000 in 6 out of 7 - 86 %). Actually, I would like to find top 5 most frequent.
Not all ranges overlap. Ranges are always positive and given as integers with 1 distance (standard range).
What I have now is only code comparing one sequence to another and returning the overlap, but after that I'm stuck.
def range_overlap(range_x,range_y):
x = (range_x[0], (range_x[-1])+1)
y = (range_y[0], (range_y[-1])+1)
overlap = (max(x[0],y[0]),min(x[-1],(y[-1])))
if overlap[0] <= overlap[1]:
return range(overlap[0], overlap[1])
else:
return "Out of range"
I would be very grateful for any help.

Better solution
I came up with a simpler solution (at least IMHO) so here it is:
def get_abs_min(ranges):
return min([min(r) for r in ranges])
def get_abs_max(ranges):
return max([max(r) for r in ranges])
def count_appearances(i, ranges):
return sum([1 for r in ranges if i in r])
def create_histogram(ranges):
keys = [str(i) for i in range(len(ranges) + 1)]
histogram = dict.fromkeys(keys)
results = []
min = get_abs_min(range_list)
max = get_abs_max(range_list)
for i in range(min, max):
count = str(count_appearances(i, ranges))
if histogram[count] is None:
histogram[count] = dict(start=i, end=None)
elif histogram[count]['end'] is None:
histogram[count]['end'] = i
elif histogram[count]['end'] == i - 1:
histogram[count]['end'] = i
else:
start = histogram[count]['start']
end = histogram[count]['end']
results.append((range(start, end + 1), count))
histogram[count]['start'] = i
histogram[count]['end'] = None
for count, d in histogram.items():
if d is not None and d['start'] is not None and d['end'] is not None:
results.append((range(d['start'], d['end'] + 1), count))
return results
def main(ranges, top):
appearances = create_histogram(ranges)
return sorted(appearances, key=lambda t: t[1], reverse=True)[:top]
The idea here is as simple as iterating through a superposition of all the ranges and building a histogram of appearances (e.g. the number of original ranges this current i appears in)
After that just sort and slice according to the chosen size of the results.
Just call main with the ranges and the top number you want (or None if you want to see all results).
OLDER EDITS BELOW
I (almost) agree with #Kasramvd's answer.
here is my take on it:
from collections import Counter
from itertools import combinations
def range_overlap(x, y):
common_part = list(set(x) & set(y))
if common_part:
return range(common_part[0], common_part[-1] +1)
else:
return False
def get_most_common(range_list, top_frequent):
overlaps = Counter(range_overlap(i, j) for i, j in
combinations(list_of_ranges, 2))
return [(r, i) for (r, i) in overlaps.most_common(top_frequent) if r]
you need to input the range_list and the number of top_frequent you want.
EDIT
the previous answer solved this question for all 2's combinations over the range list.
This edit is tested against your input and results with the correct answer:
from collections import Counter
from itertools import combinations
def range_overlap(*args):
sets = [set(r) for r in args]
common_part = list(set(args[0]).intersection(*sets))
if common_part:
return range(common_part[0], common_part[-1] +1)
else:
return False
def get_all_possible_combinations(range_list):
all_combos = []
for i in range(2, len(range_list)):
all_combos.append(combinations(range_list, i))
all_combos = [list(combo) for combo in all_combos]
return all_combos
def get_most_common_for_combo(combo):
return list(filter(None, [range_overlap(*option) for option in combo]))
def get_most_common(range_list, top_frequent):
all_overlaps = []
combos = get_all_possible_combinations(range_list)
for combo in combos:
all_overlaps.extend(get_most_common_for_combo(combo))
return [r for (r, i) in Counter(all_overlaps).most_common(top_frequent) if r]
And to get the results just run get_most_common(range_list, top_frequent)
Tested on my machine (ubunut 16.04 with python 3.5.2) with your input range_list and top_frequent = 5 with the results:
[range(3000, 4000), range(2500, 4000), range(1500, 4000), range(3000, 6000), range(1, 4000)]

You can first change your function to return a valid range in both cases so that you can use it in a set of comparisons. Also, since Python's range objects are not already created iterables but smart objects that only get start, stop and step attributes of a range and create the range on-demand, you can do a little change on your function as well.
def range_overlap(range_x,range_y):
rng = range(max(range_x.start, range_y.start),
min(range_x.stop, range_y.stop)+1)
if rng.start < rng.stop:
return rng.start, rng.stop
Now, if you have a set of ranges and you want to compare all the pairs you can use itertools.combinations to get all the pairs and then using range_overlap and collections.Counter you can find the number of overlapped ranges.
from collections import Counter
from itertools import combinations
overlaps = Counter(range_overlap(i,j) for i, j in
combinations(list_of_ranges, 2))

Given a string of a million numbers, return all repeating 3 digit numbers

I had an interview with a hedge fund company in New York a few months ago and unfortunately, I did not get the internship offer as a data/software engineer. (They also asked the solution to be in Python.)
I pretty much screwed up on the first interview problem...
Question: Given a string of a million numbers (Pi for example), write
a function/program that returns all repeating 3 digit numbers and number of
repetition greater than 1
For example: if the string was: 123412345123456 then the function/program would return:
123 - 3 times
234 - 3 times
345 - 2 times
They did not give me the solution after I failed the interview, but they did tell me that the time complexity for the solution was constant of 1000 since all the possible outcomes are between:
000 --> 999
Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't think it's possible to come up with a constant time algorithm. Is it?

You got off lightly, you probably don't want to be working for a hedge fund where the quants don't understand basic algorithms :-)
There is no way to process an arbitrarily-sized data structure in O(1) if, as in this case, you need to visit every element at least once. The best you can hope for is O(n) in this case, where n is the length of the string.
Although, as an aside, a nominal O(n) algorithm will be O(1) for a fixed input size so, technically, they may have been correct here. However, that's not usually how people use complexity analysis.
It appears to me you could have impressed them in a number of ways.
First, by informing them that it's not possible to do it in O(1), unless you use the "suspect" reasoning given above.
Second, by showing your elite skills by providing Pythonic code such as:
inpStr = '123412345123456'
# O(1) array creation.
freq = [0] * 1000
# O(n) string processing.
for val in [int(inpStr[pos:pos+3]) for pos in range(len(inpStr) - 2)]:
freq[val] += 1
# O(1) output of relevant array values.
print ([(num, freq[num]) for num in range(1000) if freq[num] > 1])
This outputs:
[(123, 3), (234, 3), (345, 2)]
though you could, of course, modify the output format to anything you desire.
And, finally, by telling them there's almost certainly no problem with an O(n) solution, since the code above delivers results for a one-million-digit string in well under half a second. It seems to scale quite linearly as well, since a 10,000,000-character string takes 3.5 seconds and a 100,000,000-character one takes 36 seconds.
And, if they need better than that, there are ways to parallelise this sort of stuff that can greatly speed it up.
Not within a single Python interpreter of course, due to the GIL, but you could split the string into something like (overlap indicated by vv is required to allow proper processing of the boundary areas):
vv
123412 vv
123451
5123456
You can farm these out to separate workers and combine the results afterwards.
The splitting of input and combining of output are likely to swamp any saving with small strings (and possibly even million-digit strings) but, for much larger data sets, it may well make a difference. My usual mantra of "measure, don't guess" applies here, of course.
This mantra also applies to other possibilities, such as bypassing Python altogether and using a different language which may be faster.
For example, the following C code, running on the same hardware as the earlier Python code, handles a hundred million digits in 0.6 seconds, roughly the same amount of time as the Python code processed one million. In other words, much faster:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
int main(void) {
static char inpStr[100000000+1];
static int freq[1000];
// Set up test data.
memset(inpStr, '1', sizeof(inpStr));
inpStr[sizeof(inpStr)-1] = '\0';
// Need at least three digits to do anything useful.
if (strlen(inpStr) <= 2) return 0;
// Get initial feed from first two digits, process others.
int val = (inpStr[0] - '0') * 10 + inpStr[1] - '0';
char *inpPtr = &(inpStr[2]);
while (*inpPtr != '\0') {
// Remove hundreds, add next digit as units, adjust table.
val = (val % 100) * 10 + *inpPtr++ - '0';
freq[val]++;
}
// Output (relevant part of) table.
for (int i = 0; i < 1000; ++i)
if (freq[i] > 1)
printf("%3d -> %d\n", i, freq[i]);
return 0;
}

Constant time isn't possible. All 1 million digits need to be looked at at least once, so that is a time complexity of O(n), where n = 1 million in this case.
For a simple O(n) solution, create an array of size 1000 that represents the number of occurrences of each possible 3 digit number. Advance 1 digit at a time, first index == 0, last index == 999997, and increment array[3 digit number] to create a histogram (count of occurrences for each possible 3 digit number). Then output the content of the array with counts > 1.

A million is small for the answer I give below. Expecting only that you have to be able to run the solution in the interview, without a pause, then The following works in less than two seconds and gives the required result:
from collections import Counter
def triple_counter(s):
c = Counter(s[n-3: n] for n in range(3, len(s)))
for tri, n in c.most_common():
if n > 1:
print('%s - %i times.' % (tri, n))
else:
break
if __name__ == '__main__':
import random
s = ''.join(random.choice('0123456789') for _ in range(1_000_000))
triple_counter(s)
Hopefully the interviewer would be looking for use of the standard libraries collections.Counter class.
Parallel execution version
I wrote a blog post on this with more explanation.

The simple O(n) solution would be to count each 3-digit number:
for nr in range(1000):
cnt = text.count('%03d' % nr)
if cnt > 1:
print '%03d is found %d times' % (nr, cnt)
This would search through all 1 million digits 1000 times.
Traversing the digits only once:
counts = [0] * 1000
for idx in range(len(text)-2):
counts[int(text[idx:idx+3])] += 1
for nr, cnt in enumerate(counts):
if cnt > 1:
print '%03d is found %d times' % (nr, cnt)
Timing shows that iterating only once over the index is twice as fast as using count.

Here is a NumPy implementation of the "consensus" O(n) algorithm: walk through all triplets and bin as you go. The binning is done by upon encountering say "385", adding one to bin[3, 8, 5] which is an O(1) operation. Bins are arranged in a 10x10x10 cube. As the binning is fully vectorized there is no loop in the code.
def setup_data(n):
import random
digits = "0123456789"
return dict(text = ''.join(random.choice(digits) for i in range(n)))
def f_np(text):
# Get the data into NumPy
import numpy as np
a = np.frombuffer(bytes(text, 'utf8'), dtype=np.uint8) - ord('0')
# Rolling triplets
a3 = np.lib.stride_tricks.as_strided(a, (3, a.size-2), 2*a.strides)
bins = np.zeros((10, 10, 10), dtype=int)
# Next line performs O(n) binning
np.add.at(bins, tuple(a3), 1)
# Filtering is left as an exercise
return bins.ravel()
def f_py(text):
counts = [0] * 1000
for idx in range(len(text)-2):
counts[int(text[idx:idx+3])] += 1
return counts
import numpy as np
import types
from timeit import timeit
for n in (10, 1000, 1000000):
data = setup_data(n)
ref = f_np(**data)
print(f'n = {n}')
for name, func in list(globals().items()):
if not name.startswith('f_') or not isinstance(func, types.FunctionType):
continue
try:
assert np.all(ref == func(**data))
print("{:16s}{:16.8f} ms".format(name[2:], timeit(
'f(**data)', globals={'f':func, 'data':data}, number=10)*100))
except:
print("{:16s} apparently crashed".format(name[2:]))
Unsurprisingly, NumPy is a bit faster than #Daniel's pure Python solution on large data sets. Sample output:
# n = 10
# np 0.03481400 ms
# py 0.00669330 ms
# n = 1000
# np 0.11215360 ms
# py 0.34836530 ms
# n = 1000000
# np 82.46765980 ms
# py 360.51235450 ms

I would solve the problem as follows:
def find_numbers(str_num):
final_dict = {}
buffer = {}
for idx in range(len(str_num) - 3):
num = int(str_num[idx:idx + 3])
if num not in buffer:
buffer[num] = 0
buffer[num] += 1
if buffer[num] > 1:
final_dict[num] = buffer[num]
return final_dict
Applied to your example string, this yields:
>>> find_numbers("123412345123456")
{345: 2, 234: 3, 123: 3}
This solution runs in O(n) for n being the length of the provided string, and is, I guess, the best you can get.

As per my understanding, you cannot have the solution in a constant time. It will take at least one pass over the million digit number (assuming its a string). You can have a 3-digit rolling iteration over the digits of the million length number and increase the value of hash key by 1 if it already exists or create a new hash key (initialized by value 1) if it doesn't exists already in the dictionary.
The code will look something like this:
def calc_repeating_digits(number):
hash = {}
for i in range(len(str(number))-2):
current_three_digits = number[i:i+3]
if current_three_digits in hash.keys():
hash[current_three_digits] += 1
else:
hash[current_three_digits] = 1
return hash
You can filter down to the keys which have item value greater than 1.

As mentioned in another answer, you cannot do this algorithm in constant time, because you must look at at least n digits. Linear time is the fastest you can get.
However, the algorithm can be done in O(1) space. You only need to store the counts of each 3 digit number, so you need an array of 1000 entries. You can then stream the number in.
My guess is that either the interviewer misspoke when they gave you the solution, or you misheard "constant time" when they said "constant space."

Here's my answer:
from timeit import timeit
from collections import Counter
import types
import random
def setup_data(n):
digits = "0123456789"
return dict(text = ''.join(random.choice(digits) for i in range(n)))
def f_counter(text):
c = Counter()
for i in range(len(text)-2):
ss = text[i:i+3]
c.update([ss])
return (i for i in c.items() if i[1] > 1)
def f_dict(text):
d = {}
for i in range(len(text)-2):
ss = text[i:i+3]
if ss not in d:
d[ss] = 0
d[ss] += 1
return ((i, d[i]) for i in d if d[i] > 1)
def f_array(text):
a = [[[0 for _ in range(10)] for _ in range(10)] for _ in range(10)]
for n in range(len(text)-2):
i, j, k = (int(ss) for ss in text[n:n+3])
a[i][j][k] += 1
for i, b in enumerate(a):
for j, c in enumerate(b):
for k, d in enumerate(c):
if d > 1: yield (f'{i}{j}{k}', d)
for n in (1E1, 1E3, 1E6):
n = int(n)
data = setup_data(n)
print(f'n = {n}')
results = {}
for name, func in list(globals().items()):
if not name.startswith('f_') or not isinstance(func, types.FunctionType):
continue
print("{:16s}{:16.8f} ms".format(name[2:], timeit(
'results[name] = f(**data)', globals={'f':func, 'data':data, 'results':results, 'name':name}, number=10)*100))
for r in results:
print('{:10}: {}'.format(r, sorted(list(results[r]))[:5]))
The array lookup method is very fast (even faster than #paul-panzer's numpy method!). Of course, it cheats since it isn't technicailly finished after it completes, because it's returning a generator. It also doesn't have to check every iteration if the value already exists, which is likely to help a lot.
n = 10
counter 0.10595780 ms
dict 0.01070654 ms
array 0.00135370 ms
f_counter : []
f_dict : []
f_array : []
n = 1000
counter 2.89462101 ms
dict 0.40434612 ms
array 0.00073838 ms
f_counter : [('008', 2), ('009', 3), ('010', 2), ('016', 2), ('017', 2)]
f_dict : [('008', 2), ('009', 3), ('010', 2), ('016', 2), ('017', 2)]
f_array : [('008', 2), ('009', 3), ('010', 2), ('016', 2), ('017', 2)]
n = 1000000
counter 2849.00500992 ms
dict 438.44007806 ms
array 0.00135370 ms
f_counter : [('000', 1058), ('001', 943), ('002', 1030), ('003', 982), ('004', 1042)]
f_dict : [('000', 1058), ('001', 943), ('002', 1030), ('003', 982), ('004', 1042)]
f_array : [('000', 1058), ('001', 943), ('002', 1030), ('003', 982), ('004', 1042)]

Image as answer:
Looks like a sliding window.

Here is my solution:
from collections import defaultdict
string = "103264685134845354863"
d = defaultdict(int)
for elt in range(len(string)-2):
d[string[elt:elt+3]] += 1
d = {key: d[key] for key in d.keys() if d[key] > 1}
With a bit of creativity in for loop(and additional lookup list with True/False/None for example) you should be able to get rid of last line, as you only want to create keys in dict that we visited once up to that point.
Hope it helps :)

-Telling from the perspective of C.
-You can have an int 3-d array results[10][10][10];
-Go from 0th location to n-4th location, where n being the size of the string array.
-On each location, check the current, next and next's next.
-Increment the cntr as resutls[current][next][next's next]++;
-Print the values of
results[1][2][3]
results[2][3][4]
results[3][4][5]
results[4][5][6]
results[5][6][7]
results[6][7][8]
results[7][8][9]
-It is O(n) time, there is no comparisons involved.
-You can run some parallel stuff here by partitioning the array and calculating the matches around the partitions.

inputStr = '123456123138276237284287434628736482376487234682734682736487263482736487236482634'
count = {}
for i in range(len(inputStr) - 2):
subNum = int(inputStr[i:i+3])
if subNum not in count:
count[subNum] = 1
else:
count[subNum] += 1
print count

How to reduce a collection of ranges to a minimal set of ranges [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Union of multiple ranges
(5 answers)
Closed 7 years ago.
I'm trying to remove overlapping values from a collection of ranges.
The ranges are represented by a string like this:
499-505 100-115 80-119 113-140 500-550
I want the above to be reduced to two ranges: 80-140 499-550. That covers all the values without overlap.
Currently I have the following code.
cr = "100-115 115-119 113-125 80-114 180-185 500-550 109-120 95-114 200-250".split(" ")
ar = []
br = []
for i in cr:
(left,right) = i.split("-")
ar.append(left);
br.append(right);
inc = 0
for f in br:
i = int(f)
vac = []
jnc = 0
for g in ar:
j = int(g)
if(i >= j):
vac.append(j)
del br[jnc]
jnc += jnc
print vac
inc += inc
I split the array by - and store the range limits in ar and br. I iterate over these limits pairwise and if the i is at least as great as the j, I want to delete the element. But the program doesn't work. I expect it to produce this result: 80-125 500-550 200-250 180-185

For a quick and short solution,
from operator import itemgetter
from itertools import groupby
cr = "499-505 100-115 80-119 113-140 500-550".split(" ")
fullNumbers = []
for i in cr:
a = int(i.split("-")[0])
b = int(i.split("-")[1])
fullNumbers+=range(a,b+1)
# Remove duplicates and sort it
fullNumbers = sorted(list(set(fullNumbers)))
# Taken From http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2154249
def convertToRanges(data):
result = []
for k, g in groupby(enumerate(data), lambda (i,x):i-x):
group = map(itemgetter(1), g)
result.append(str(group[0])+"-"+str(group[-1]))
return result
print convertToRanges(fullNumbers)
#Output: ['80-140', '499-550']
For the given set in your program, output is ['80-125', '180-185', '200-250', '500-550']
Main Possible drawback of this solution: This may not be scalable!

Let me offer another solution that doesn't take time linearly proportional to the sum of the range sizes. Its running time is linearly proportional to the number of ranges.
def reduce(range_text):
parts = range_text.split()
if parts == []:
return ''
ranges = [ tuple(map(int, part.split('-'))) for part in parts ]
ranges.sort()
new_ranges = []
left, right = ranges[0]
for range in ranges[1:]:
next_left, next_right = range
if right + 1 < next_left: # Is the next range to the right?
new_ranges.append((left, right)) # Close the current range.
left, right = range # Start a new range.
else:
right = max(right, next_right) # Extend the current range.
new_ranges.append((left, right)) # Close the last range.
return ' '.join([ '-'.join(map(str, range)) for range in new_ranges ]
This function works by sorting the ranges, then looking at them in order and merging consecutive ranges that intersect.
Examples:
print(reduce('499-505 100-115 80-119 113-140 500-550'))
# => 80-140 499-550
print(reduce('100-115 115-119 113-125 80-114 180-185 500-550 109-120 95-114 200-250'))
# => 80-125 180-185 200-250 500-550

Algorithm for matching objects

I have 1,000 objects, each object has 4 attribute lists: a list of words, images, audio files and video files.
I want to compare each object against:
a single object, Ox, from the 1,000.
every other object.
A comparison will be something like:
sum(words in common+ images in common+...).
I want an algorithm that will help me find the closest 5, say, objects to Ox and (a different?) algorithm to find the closest 5 pairs of objects
I've looked into cluster analysis and maximal matching and they don't seem to exactly fit this scenario. I don't want to use these method if something more apt exists, so does this look like a particular type of algorithm to anyone, or can anyone point me in the right direction to applying the algorithms I mentioned to this?

I made an example program for how to solve your first question. But you have to implement ho you want to compare images, audio and videos. And I assume every object has the same length for all lists. To answer your question number two it would be something similar, but with a double loop.
import numpy as np
from random import randint
class Thing:
def __init__(self, words, images, audios, videos):
self.words = words
self.images = images
self.audios = audios
self.videos = videos
def compare(self, other):
score = 0
# Assuming the attribute lists have the same length for both objects
# and that they are sorted in the same manner:
for i in range(len(self.words)):
if self.words[i] == other.words[i]:
score += 1
for i in range(len(self.images)):
if self.images[i] == other.images[i]:
score += 1
# And so one for audio and video. You have to make sure you know
# what method to use for determining when an image/audio/video are
# equal.
return score
N = 1000
things = []
words = np.random.randint(5, size=(N,5))
images = np.random.randint(5, size=(N,5))
audios = np.random.randint(5, size=(N,5))
videos = np.random.randint(5, size=(N,5))
# For testing purposes I assign each attribute to a list (array) containing
# five random integers. I don't know how you actually intend to do it.
for i in xrange(N):
things.append(Thing(words[i], images[i], audios[i], videos[i]))
# I will assume that object number 999 (i=999) is the Ox:
ox = 999
scores = np.zeros(N - 1)
for i in xrange(N - 1):
scores[i] = (things[ox].compare(things[i]))
best = np.argmax(scores)
print "The most similar thing is thing number %d." % best
print
print "Ox attributes:"
print things[ox].words
print things[ox].images
print things[ox].audios
print things[ox].videos
print
print "Best match attributes:"
print things[ox].words
print things[ox].images
print things[ox].audios
print things[ox].videos
EDIT:
Now here is the same program modified sligthly to answer your second question. It turned out to be very simple. I basically just needed to add 4 lines:
Changing scores into a (N,N) array instead of just (N).
Adding for j in xrange(N): and thus creating a double loop.
if i == j:
break
where 3. and 4. is just to make sure that I only compare each pair of things once and not twice and don't compary any things with themselves.
Then there is a few more lines of code that is needed to extract the indices of the 5 largest values in scores. I also reformated the printing so it will be easy to confirm by eye that the printed pairs are actually very similar.
Here comes the new code:
import numpy as np
class Thing:
def __init__(self, words, images, audios, videos):
self.words = words
self.images = images
self.audios = audios
self.videos = videos
def compare(self, other):
score = 0
# Assuming the attribute lists have the same length for both objects
# and that they are sorted in the same manner:
for i in range(len(self.words)):
if self.words[i] == other.words[i]:
score += 1
for i in range(len(self.images)):
if self.images[i] == other.images[i]:
score += 1
for i in range(len(self.audios)):
if self.audios[i] == other.audios[i]:
score += 1
for i in range(len(self.videos)):
if self.videos[i] == other.videos[i]:
score += 1
# You have to make sure you know what method to use for determining
# when an image/audio/video are equal.
return score
N = 1000
things = []
words = np.random.randint(5, size=(N,5))
images = np.random.randint(5, size=(N,5))
audios = np.random.randint(5, size=(N,5))
videos = np.random.randint(5, size=(N,5))
# For testing purposes I assign each attribute to a list (array) containing
# five random integers. I don't know how you actually intend to do it.
for i in xrange(N):
things.append(Thing(words[i], images[i], audios[i], videos[i]))
################################################################################
############################# This is the new part: ############################
################################################################################
scores = np.zeros((N, N))
# Scores will become a triangular matrix where scores[i, j]=value means that
# value is the number of attrributes thing[i] and thing[j] have in common.
for i in xrange(N):
for j in xrange(N):
if i == j:
break
# Break the loop here because:
# * When i==j we would compare thing[i] with itself, and we don't
# want that.
# * For every combination where j>i we would repeat all the
# comparisons for j<i and create duplicates. We don't want that.
scores[i, j] = (things[i].compare(things[j]))
# I want the 5 most similar pairs:
n = 5
# This list will contain a tuple for each of the n most similar pairs:
best_list = []
for k in xrange(n):
ij = np.argmax(scores) # Returns a single integer: ij = i*n + j
i = ij / N
j = ij % N
best_list.append((i, j))
# Erease this score so that on next iteration the second largest score
# is found:
scores[i, j] = 0
for k, (i, j) in enumerate(best_list):
# The number 1 most similar pair is the BEST match of all.
# The number N most similar pair is the WORST match of all.
print "The number %d most similar pair is thing number %d and %d." \
% (k+1, i, j)
print "Thing%4d:" % i, \
things[i].words, things[i].images, things[i].audios, things[i].videos
print "Thing%4d:" % j, \
things[j].words, things[j].images, things[j].audios, things[j].videos
print

If your comparison works with "create a sum of all features and find those which the closest sum", there is a simple trick to get close objects:
Put all objects into an array
Calculate all the sums
Sort the array by sum.
If you take any index, the objects close to it will now have a close index as well. So to find the 5 closest objects, you just need to look at index+5 to index-5 in the sorted array.

Counting number of values between interval

Is there any efficient way in python to count the times an array of numbers is between certain intervals? the number of intervals i will be using may get quite large
like:
mylist = [4,4,1,18,2,15,6,14,2,16,2,17,12,3,12,4,15,5,17]
some function(mylist, startpoints):
# startpoints = [0,10,20]
count values in range [0,9]
count values in range [10-19]
output = [9,10]

you will have to iterate the list at least once.
The solution below works with any sequence/interval that implements comparision (<, >, etc) and uses bisect algorithm to find the correct point in the interval, so it is very fast.
It will work with floats, text, or whatever. Just pass a sequence and a list of the intervals.
from collections import defaultdict
from bisect import bisect_left
def count_intervals(sequence, intervals):
count = defaultdict(int)
intervals.sort()
for item in sequence:
pos = bisect_left(intervals, item)
if pos == len(intervals):
count[None] += 1
else:
count[intervals[pos]] += 1
return count
data = [4,4,1,18,2,15,6,14,2,16,2,17,12,3,12,4,15,5,17]
print count_intervals(data, [10, 20])
Will print
defaultdict(<type 'int'>, {10: 10, 20: 9})
Meaning that you have 10 values <10 and 9 values <20.

I don't know how large your list will get but here's another approach.
import numpy as np
mylist = [4,4,1,18,2,15,6,14,2,16,2,17,12,3,12,4,15,5,17]
np.histogram(mylist, bins=[0,9,19])

You can also use a combination of value_counts() and pd.cut() to help you get the job done.
import pandas as pd
mylist = [4,4,1,18,2,15,6,14,2,16,2,17,12,3,12,4,15,5,17]
split_mylist = pd.cut(mylist, [0, 9, 19]).value_counts(sort = False)
print(split_mylist)
This piece of code will return this:
(0, 10] 10
(10, 20] 9
dtype: int64
Then you can utilise the to_list() function to get what you want
split_mylist = split_mylist.tolist()
print(split_mylist)
Output: [10, 9]

If the numbers are integers, as in your example, representing the intervals as frozensets can perhaps be fastest (worth trying). Not sure if the intervals are guaranteed to be mutually exclusive -- if not, then
intervals = [frozenzet(range(10)), frozenset(range(10, 20))]
counts = [0] * len(intervals)
for n in mylist:
for i, inter in enumerate(intervals):
if n in inter:
counts[i] += 1
if the intervals are mutually exclusive, this code could be sped up a bit by breaking out of the inner loop right after the increment. However for mutually exclusive intervals of integers >= 0, there's an even more attractive option: first, prepare an auxiliary index, e.g. given your startpoints data structure that could be
indices = [sum(i > x for x in startpoints) - 1 for i in range(max(startpoints))]
and then
counts = [0] * len(intervals)
for n in mylist:
if 0 <= n < len(indices):
counts[indices[n]] += 1
this can be adjusted if the intervals can be < 0 (everything needs to be offset by -min(startpoints) in that case.
If the "numbers" can be arbitrary floats (or decimal.Decimals, etc), not just integer, the possibilities for optimization are more restricted. Is that the case...?