# Processing csv file with more than 700K rows of data

I have a .csv file (around 400MB in size) which contains 700K rows of structured data. Table structure is:


+----+----------+-------+-----------+--------+--------+
| Id | Category | List1 |   List2   | Value1 | Value2 |
+----+----------+-------+-----------+--------+--------+
|  1 |        1 | A,B,C | Cat1,Cat2 |    100 |      5 |
|  2 |        1 | D,F   | Cat1,Cat4 |    120 |      4 |
|  3 |        2 | E,A   | Cat3      |    140 |      2 |
|  4 |        2 | E,A   | NULL      |    110 |      3 |
|  5 |        3 | B     | Cat2      |    100 |      6 |
+----+----------+-------+-----------+--------+--------+


For each row (CurrentRow) of the table I want to calculate:
CurrentRow.Value3 = SUM(Value1)/SUM(Value2) of all other rows (OtherRow) in the table where the following conditions are met:

Condition1 = CurrentRow.Category != OtherRow.Category
Condition2 = CurrentRow.List1 intersects OtherRow.List1
Condition3 = CurrentRow.List2 intersects OtherRow.List2 or CurrentRow.List2 = NULL or OtherRow.List2 = NULL


Also, I want to list Ids of rows which where involved into calculation of Value3.

Example for first row:
Condition1: first row has category value 1. As a result, rows 3-4 meet consition #1 because their category values are not equal to 1.
Condition2: column "List1" has values "A,B,C" which intersects with values "E,A" (row #3), "E,A" (row #4), "B" (row #5).
Condition3: Column "List2" has values "Cat1,Cat2" which intersects with values "Cat1,Cat4" (row #2), "Cat2" (row #5) and also we take row #4 as it has "NULL" value.

As a result, we take rows #4 and #5 as they both meet all conditions.
Value3 = (110+100)/(3+6) = 210/9 = 23.33
Ids = "4,5"

The result for table above would be:

+----+----------+-------+-----------+--------+--------+--------+------+
| Id | Category | List1 |   List2   | Value1 | Value2 | Value3 | Ids  |
+----+----------+-------+-----------+--------+--------+--------+------+
|  1 |        1 | A,B,C | Cat1,Cat2 |    100 |      5 | 23.33  | 4,5  |
|  2 |        1 | D,F   | Cat1,Cat4 |    120 |      4 | NULL   | NULL |
|  3 |        2 | E,A   | Cat3      |    140 |      2 | NULL   | NULL |
|  4 |        2 | E,A   | NULL      |    110 |      3 | 20     | 1    |
|  5 |        3 | B     | Cat2      |    100 |      6 | 20     | 1    |
+----+----------+-------+-----------+--------+--------+--------+------+


I have tried to do it using pandas in python:

data = pd.read_pickle('data.df')
for _index, _record in data.iterrows():
category = _record["Category"]
list1 = _record["List1"]
list2 = _record["list2"]
candidates = data.loc[(data['Category'] != category) & (pd.Series(list1).isin(data["List1"]).any()) & ((pd.Series(list2).isin(data["List2"]).any()) | (data["List2"][0] == 'NULL') | (list2[0] == 'NULL'))]
value1_sum = candidates["Value1"].sum()
value2_sum = candidates["Value2"].sum()
ids = candidates[['Id']].to_numpy()
if value2_sum > 0:
data.loc[_index, "Value3"] = value1_sum/ value2_sum
data.loc[_index, "Ids"] = ids
data.to_csv('result.csv')


It works for small number of rows, but takes forever on 700K rows. Is there any method to optimize this algorithm?

• Have you tried to split the data set? Then you could apply the operations to each of the datasets and then concatenate them at the end. – MachineLearner May 10 at 6:43
• @MachineLearner I am afraid this approach will not work. That is because if I will split the data set, information would become partitioned and useless to calculate Value3 which requires the whole dataset to be calculated. – mbax2ak3 May 10 at 7:03

I think the main time-consumer will be the fact that you are iterating over 700,000 rows, one-by-one.

You could perhaps do a few of your checks/comparisons (used in the line with bit-wise stuff: &, | etc) to begin with, for all rows. So for that row, it looks like this now:

data.loc[
(data['Category'] != category) &
(pd.Series(list1).isin(data["List1"]).any()) &
(pd.Series(list2).isin(data["List2"]).any()) |
(data["List2"][0] == 'NULL') |
(list2[0] == 'NULL'))]


Before the loop, you could pre-compute each of those rows, adding the results for each comparison as a new columns:

data["check1"] = data['Category'] != category
data["check2"] = ...
data["check3"] = ...
data["check4"] = ...
data["check5"] = data.List2 == "NULL"


Now use those columns' values in your line with all comparisons.

To gain a better understanding of what it taking up all the time, you could profile the code, e.g. using the CProfile module. You could just run over the first 100 rows of your data for that purpose - the profiling tool will give summary statistics.

If you really want to get stuck into it, check out tha Pandas performance improvement methods, which get into using Numba and Cython. There can be huge gains here, but you need to maybe invest a little more effort. Numba would be the easiest to begin with; unless you are experienced with C-languages.