I have two sets of strings (A and B), and I want to know all pairs of strings a in A and b in B where a is a substring of b.
The first step of coding this was the following:
for a in A:
for b in B:
if a in b:
print (a,b)
However, I wanted to know-- is there a more efficient way to do this with regular expressions (e.g. instead of checking if a in b:, check if the regexp '.*' + a + '.*': matches 'b'. I thought that maybe using something like this would let me cache the Knuth-Morris-Pratt failure function for all a. Also, using a list comprehension for the inner for b in B: loop will likely give a pretty big speedup (and a nested list comprehension may be even better).
I'm not very interested in making a giant leap in the asymptotic runtime of the algorithm (e.g. using a suffix tree or anything else complex and clever). I'm more concerned with the constant (I just need to do this for several pairs of A and B sets, and I don't want it to run all week).
Do you know any tricks or have any generic advice to do this more quickly? Thanks a lot for any insight you can share!
Edit:
Using the advice of @ninjagecko and @Sven Marnach, I built a quick prefix table of 10-mers:
import collections
prefix_table = collections.defaultdict(set)
for k, b in enumerate(B):
for i in xrange(len(prot_seq)-10):
j = i+10+1
prefix_table[b[i:j]].add(k)
for a in A:
if len(a) >= 10:
for k in prefix_table[a[:10]]:
# check if a is in b
# (missing_edges is necessary, but not sufficient)
if a in B[k]:
print (a,b)
else:
for k in xrange(len(prots_and_seqs)):
# a is too small to use the table; check if
# a is in any b
if a in B[k]:
print (a, b)
Of course you can easily write this as a list comprehension:
[(a, b) for a in A for b in B if a in b]
This might slightly speed up the loop, but don't expect too much. I doubt using regular expressions will help in any way with this one.
Edit: Here are some timings:
import itertools
import timeit
import re
import collections
with open("/usr/share/dict/british-english") as f:
A = [s.strip() for s in itertools.islice(f, 28000, 30000)]
B = [s.strip() for s in itertools.islice(f, 23000, 25000)]
def f():
result = []
for a in A:
for b in B:
if a in b:
result.append((a, b))
return result
def g():
return [(a, b) for a in A for b in B if a in b]
def h():
res = [re.compile(re.escape(a)) for a in A]
return [(a, b) for a in res for b in B if a.search(b)]
def ninjagecko():
d = collections.defaultdict(set)
for k, b in enumerate(B):
for i, j in itertools.combinations(range(len(b) + 1), 2):
d[b[i:j]].add(k)
return [(a, B[k]) for a in A for k in d[a]]
print "Nested loop", timeit.repeat(f, number=1)
print "List comprehension", timeit.repeat(g, number=1)
print "Regular expressions", timeit.repeat(h, number=1)
print "ninjagecko", timeit.repeat(ninjagecko, number=1)
Results:
Nested loop [0.3641810417175293, 0.36279606819152832, 0.36295199394226074]
List comprehension [0.362030029296875, 0.36148500442504883, 0.36158299446105957]
Regular expressions [1.6498990058898926, 1.6494300365447998, 1.6480278968811035]
ninjagecko [0.06402897834777832, 0.063711881637573242, 0.06389307975769043]
Edit 2: Added a variant of the alogrithm suggested by ninjagecko to the timings. You can see it is much better than all the brute force approaches.
Edit 3: Used sets instead of lists to eliminate the duplicates. (I did not update the timings -- they remained essentially unchanged.)