How do I get indices of N maximum values in a NumPy array?

Question

NumPy proposes a way to get the index of the maximum value of an array via np.argmax.

I would like a similar thing, but returning the indexes of the

Answer 1

Newer NumPy versions (1.8 and up) have a function called argpartition for this. To get the indices of the four largest elements, do

>>> a = np.array([9, 4, 4, 3, 3, 9, 0, 4, 6, 0])
>>> a
array([9, 4, 4, 3, 3, 9, 0, 4, 6, 0])
>>> ind = np.argpartition(a, -4)[-4:]
>>> ind
array([1, 5, 8, 0])
>>> a[ind]
array([4, 9, 6, 9])

Unlike argsort, this function runs in linear time in the worst case, but the returned indices are not sorted, as can be seen from the result of evaluating a[ind]. If you need that too, sort them afterwards:

>>> ind[np.argsort(a[ind])]
array([1, 8, 5, 0])

To get the top-k elements in sorted order in this way takes O(n + k log k) time.