Get N maximum values and indices along an axis in a NumPy array

Question

I think this is an easy question for experienced numpy users.

I have a score matrix. The raw index corresponds to samples and column index corresponds to items. For

Answer 1

In case someone is interested in the both the values and corresponding indices without tempering with the order, the following simple approach will be helpful. Though it could be computationally expensive if working with large data since we are using a list to store tuples of value, index.

import numpy as np
values = np.array([0.01,0.6, 0.4, 0.0, 0.1,0.7, 0.12]) # a simple array
values_indices = [] # define an empty list to store values and indices
while values.shape[0]>1:
    values_indices.append((values.max(), values.argmax()))
    # remove the maximum value from the array:
    values = np.delete(values, values.argmax())

The final output as list of tuples:

values_indices
[(0.7, 5), (0.6, 1), (0.4, 1), (0.12, 3), (0.1, 2), (0.01, 0)]