Finding the Index of N biggest elements in Python Array / List Efficiently

Question

I\'m sorry in advance if this is a duplicated question, I looked for this information but still couldn\'t find it.

Is it possible to arrange a numpy array (or python

Answer 1

Have you looked at the built-in numpy argsort method?:

http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.argsort.html

I can sort an array with 300,000 random floats in about 29 ms on my machine using that method.

def f(a,N):
    return np.argsort(a)[::-1][:N]