We can speed up the matching in a couple of ways. I assume that in your code str1 is a name from your dataset and str2 is a geoname string. To test the code I made two tiny data sets from the data in your question. And I wrote two matching functions best_match and first_match that use your current string_similarity function so we can see that my strategy gives the same results. best_match checks all geoname strings & returns the string with the highest score if it exceeds a given threshold score, otherwise it returns None. first_match is (potentially) faster: it just returns the first geoname string that exceeds the threshold, or None if it can't find one, so if it doesn't find a match then it still has to search the entire geoname list.
In my improved version, we generate the bigrams for each str1 once, rather than re-generating the bigrams for str1 for each str2 that we compare it with. And we compute all the geoname bigrams in advance, storing them in a dict indexed by the string so that we don't have to regenerate them for each str. Also, we store the geoname bigrams as sets. That makes computing the hit_count much faster, since set membership testing is much faster than doing a linear scan over a list of strings. The geodict also needs to store the length of each bigram: a set contains no duplicate items, so the length of the set of bigrams may be smaller than the list of bigrams, but we need the list length to compute the score correctly.
# Some fake data
geonames = [
'Slettmarkmountains Jotunheimen Norway',
'Fairy Glen Skye Scotland UK',
'Emigrant Wilderness California',
'Yosemite National Park',
'Half Dome Yosemite National Park',
]
mynames = [
'Jotunheimen Norway',
'Fairy Glen',
'Slettmarkmountains Jotunheimen Norway',
'Bryce Canyon',
'Half Dome',
]
def get_bigrams(string):
"""
Take a string and return a list of bigrams.
"""
s = string.lower()
return [s[i:i+2] for i in range(len(s) - 1)]
def string_similarity(str1, str2):
"""
Perform bigram comparison between two strings
and return a percentage match in decimal form.
"""
pairs1 = get_bigrams(str1)
pairs2 = get_bigrams(str2)
union = len(pairs1) + len(pairs2)
hit_count = 0
for x in pairs1:
for y in pairs2:
if x == y:
hit_count += 1
break
return (2.0 * hit_count) / union
# Find the string in geonames which is the best match to str1
def best_match(str1, thresh=0.2):
score, str2 = max((string_similarity(str1, str2), str2) for str2 in geonames)
if score < thresh:
str2 = None
return score, str2
# Find the 1st string in geonames that matches str1 with a score >= thresh
def first_match(str1, thresh=0.2):
for str2 in geonames:
score = string_similarity(str1, str2)
if score >= thresh:
return score, str2
return None
print('Best')
for mystr in mynames:
print(mystr, ':', best_match(mystr))
print()
print('First')
for mystr in mynames:
print(mystr, ':', best_match(mystr))
print()
# Put all the geoname bigrams into a dict
geodict = {}
for s in geonames:
bigrams = get_bigrams(s)
geodict[s] = (set(bigrams), len(bigrams))
def new_best_match(str1, thresh=0.2):
pairs1 = get_bigrams(str1)
pairs1_len = len(pairs1)
score, str2 = max((2.0 * sum(x in pairs2 for x in pairs1) / (pairs1_len + pairs2_len), str2)
for str2, (pairs2, pairs2_len) in geodict.items())
if score < thresh:
str2 = None
return score, str2
def new_first_match(str1, thresh=0.2):
pairs1 = get_bigrams(str1)
pairs1_len = len(pairs1)
for str2, (pairs2, pairs2_len) in geodict.items():
score = 2.0 * sum(x in pairs2 for x in pairs1) / (pairs1_len + pairs2_len)
if score >= thresh:
return score, str2
return None
print('New Best')
for mystr in mynames:
print(mystr, ':', new_best_match(mystr))
print()
print('New First')
for mystr in mynames:
print(mystr, ':', new_first_match(mystr))
print()
output
Best
Jotunheimen Norway : (0.6415094339622641, 'Slettmarkmountains Jotunheimen Norway')
Fairy Glen : (0.5142857142857142, 'Fairy Glen Skye Scotland UK')
Slettmarkmountains Jotunheimen Norway : (1.0, 'Slettmarkmountains Jotunheimen Norway')
Bryce Canyon : (0.1875, None)
Half Dome : (0.41025641025641024, 'Half Dome Yosemite National Park')
First
Jotunheimen Norway : (0.6415094339622641, 'Slettmarkmountains Jotunheimen Norway')
Fairy Glen : (0.5142857142857142, 'Fairy Glen Skye Scotland UK')
Slettmarkmountains Jotunheimen Norway : (1.0, 'Slettmarkmountains Jotunheimen Norway')
Bryce Canyon : (0.1875, None)
Half Dome : (0.41025641025641024, 'Half Dome Yosemite National Park')
New Best
Jotunheimen Norway : (0.6415094339622641, 'Slettmarkmountains Jotunheimen Norway')
Fairy Glen : (0.5142857142857142, 'Fairy Glen Skye Scotland UK')
Slettmarkmountains Jotunheimen Norway : (1.0, 'Slettmarkmountains Jotunheimen Norway')
Bryce Canyon : (0.1875, None)
Half Dome : (0.41025641025641024, 'Half Dome Yosemite National Park')
New First
Jotunheimen Norway : (0.6415094339622641, 'Slettmarkmountains Jotunheimen Norway')
Fairy Glen : (0.5142857142857142, 'Fairy Glen Skye Scotland UK')
Slettmarkmountains Jotunheimen Norway : (1.0, 'Slettmarkmountains Jotunheimen Norway')
Bryce Canyon : None
Half Dome : (0.41025641025641024, 'Half Dome Yosemite National Park')
new_first_match is fairly straight-forward. The line
for str2, (pairs2, pairs2_len) in geodict.items():
loops over every item in geodict extracting each string, bigram set and true bigram length.
sum(x in pairs2 for x in pairs1)
counts how many of the bigrams in pairs1 are members of the pairs2 set.
So for each geoname string, we compute the similarity score and return it if it's >= the threshold, which has a default value of 0.2. You can give it a different default thresh, or pass a thresh when you call it.
new_best_match is a little more complicated. ;)
((2.0 * sum(x in pairs2 for x in pairs1) / (pairs1_len + pairs2_len), str2)
for str2, (pairs2, pairs2_len) in geodict.items())
is a generator expression. It loops over the geodict items and creates a (score, str2) tuple for each geoname string. We then feed that generator expression to the max function, which returns the tuple with the highest score.
Here's a version of new_first_match that implements the suggestion that juvian made in the comments. It may save a little bit of time. This version also avoids testing if either bigram is empty.
def new_first_match(str1, thresh=0.2):
pairs1 = get_bigrams(str1)
pairs1_len = len(pairs1)
if not pairs1_len:
return None
hiscore = 0
for str2, (pairs2, pairs2_len) in geodict.items():
if not pairs2_len:
continue
total_len = pairs1_len + pairs2_len
bound = 2.0 * pairs1_len / total_len
if bound >= hiscore:
score = 2.0 * sum(x in pairs2 for x in pairs1) / total_len
if score >= thresh:
return score, str2
hiscore = max(hiscore, score)
return None
A simpler variation is to not bother computing hiscore & just compare bound to thresh.
