swifter VS modin

With concat, merge, melt, and pivot_table, that may cover everything I have ever needed. There may be more efficient ways at times, but swifter promises to do that for you, maybe it is true.

Since you already have a working python script, you can try swifter with minimal effort to see if it brings about a significant speedup before digging further.

With few lines of code? Swifter for quicker pandas apply and then there's numba. With concurrent.futures, it'll be a bit more lines of code.

The interesting thing about Polars is that it does not try to be a drop-in replacement to pandas, like Dask, cuDF, or Modin, and instead has its own expressive API. Despite being a young project, it quickly got popular thanks to its easy installation process and its “lightning fast” performance.

Yeah, tried Polars a couple of times: the API seems worse than Pandas to me too. eg the decision only to support autoincrementing integer indexes seems like it would make debugging "hmmm, that answer is wrong, what exactly did I select?" bugs much more annoying. Polars docs write "blazingly fast" all over them but I doubt that is a compelling point for people using single-node dataframe libraries. It isn't for me.

Modin (https://github.com/modin-project/modin) seems more promising at this point, particularly since a migration path for standing Pandas code is highly desirable.

If anyone wants a faster version of pandas it’s not hard to find, modin for example uses multiple cores to speed it up, so if you have 4 cores it’s about 4 times faster than pandas, and has the same API as pandas.

Modin should fit. It implements Pandas APIs with e.g. Ray as backend. https://github.com/modin-project/modin

If you really want speed you should try modin.pandas which makes pandas multi-threaded.

I am guessing XGB is fairly optimised as it is. If you would want to use the sklearn libraries with pandas, look into Modin

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