SortingLab.jl

Faster sorting algorithms (sort and sortperm) for Julia
Popularity
23 Stars
Updated Last
11 Months Ago
Started In
January 2018
author title date
Dai ZJ
SortingLab README
2019--09-28

SortingLab

An alternative implementation of sorting algorithms and APIs. The ultimate aim is to contribute back to Julia base or SortingAlgorithms.jl. However, there is commitment to keep this package's API stable and supported, so other developers can rely on the implementation and API here.

Faster Sort and Sortperm

The main function exported by SortingLab is fsort and fsortperm which generally implements faster algorithms than sort and sortperm for CategoricalArrays.CategoricalVector, Vector{T}, Vector{Union{T, Missing}} where T is

  • Int*, UInt*, Float*, String

Note: The reason why we restrict the type to Vector is that SortingLab.jl assumes something about memory layout and hence Vector provides that guarantee in the types supported.

Usage

using SortingLab;
using Test
N = 1_000_000;
K = 100;

svec = rand("id".*string.(1:N÷K, pad=10), N);

svec_sorted = fsort(svec);
@test issorted(svec_sorted)
@test issorted(svec) == false
Test Passed
# faster string sortperm
sorted_idx = fsortperm(svec)
issorted(svec[sorted_idx]) #true

# in place string sort
fsort!(svec);
issorted(svec) # true
true
# CategoricalArray sort
using CategoricalArrays
pools = "id".*string.(1:100,3);
byvec = CategoricalArray{String, 1}(rand(UInt32(1):UInt32(length(pools)), N), CategoricalPool(pools, false));
byvec = compress(byvec);

byvec_sorted = fsort(byvec);
@test issorted(byvec_sorted)
Test Passed

Sorting Vector{Union{T, Missing}}

For vectors that contain missing, the sort and sortperm performance is often sub-optimal in Base and is not supported in SortingAlgorithms.jl's radixsort implementation. This is solved by SortingLab.jl fsort, see Benchmarks Section

using Test
using Missings: allowmissing
x = allowmissing(rand(1:10_000, 1_000_000))
x[rand(1:length(x), 100_000)] .= missing

using SortingLab
@test isequal(fsort(x), sort(x))
Test Passed

Benchmarks

Base.sort vs SortingLab.radixsort

Base.sort vs SortingLab.radixsort

Base.sort vs SortingLab.fsort

Base.sortperm vs SortingLab.sortperm

Benchmarking code

using SortingLab;
using BenchmarkTools;
import Random: randstring

N = 1_000_000;
K = 100;

svec = rand("id".*string.(1:N÷K, pad=10), N);
sort_id_1m = @belapsed sort($svec);
radixsort_id_1m = @belapsed radixsort($svec);

sortperm_id_1m = @belapsed sortperm($svec);
fsortperm_id_1m = @belapsed fsortperm($svec);

rsvec = rand([randstring(rand(1:32)) for i = 1:N÷K], N);
sort_r_1m = @belapsed sort($rsvec);
radixsort_r_1m = @belapsed radixsort($rsvec);

sortperm_r_1m = @belapsed sortperm($rsvec);
fsortperm_r_1m = @belapsed fsortperm($rsvec);

using Plots
using StatsPlots
groupedbar(
    repeat(["IDs", "Random len 32"], inner=2),
    [sort_id_1m, radixsort_id_1m, sort_r_1m, radixsort_r_1m],
    group = repeat(["Base.sort","SortingLab.radixsort"], outer = 2),
    title = "Strings sort (1m rows): Base vs SortingLab")
savefig("benchmarks/sort_vs_radixsort.png")

groupedbar(
    repeat(["IDs", "Random len 32"], inner=2),
    [sortperm_id_1m, fsortperm_id_1m, sortperm_r_1m, fsortperm_r_1m],
    group = repeat(["Base.sortperm","SortingLab.fsortperm"], outer = 2),
    title = "Strings sortperm (1m rows): Base vs SortingLab")
savefig("benchmarks/sortperm_vs_fsortperm.png")

Similar package

https://github.com/JuliaCollections/SortingAlgorithms.jl

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