I have the following pandas dataframe Top15:

I create a column that estimates the number of citable documents per person:

Top15['PopEst'] = Top15['Energy Supply'] / Top15['Energy Supply per Capita']
Top15['Citable docs per Capita'] = Top15['Citable documents'] / Top15['PopEst']

I want to know the correlation between the number of citable documents per capita and the energy supply per capita. So I use the .corr() method (Pearson’s correlation):

data = Top15[['Citable docs per Capita','Energy Supply per Capita']]
correlation = data.corr(method='pearson')

I want to return a single number, but the result is:

Without actual data it is hard to answer the question but I guess you are looking for something like this:

Top15['Citable docs per Capita'].corr(Top15['Energy Supply per Capita'])

That calculates the correlation between your two columns 'Citable docs per Capita' and 'Energy Supply per Capita'.

To give an example:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({'A': range(4), 'B': [2*i for i in range(4)]})

   A  B
0  0  0
1  1  2
2  2  4
3  3  6

Then

df['A'].corr(df['B'])

gives 1 as expected.

Now, if you change a value, e.g.

df.loc[2, 'B'] = 4.5

   A    B
0  0  0.0
1  1  2.0
2  2  4.5
3  3  6.0

the command

df['A'].corr(df['B'])

returns

0.99586

which is still close to 1, as expected.

If you apply .corr directly to your dataframe, it will return all pairwise correlations between your columns; that’s why you then observe 1s at the diagonal of your matrix (each column is perfectly correlated with itself).

df.corr()

will therefore return

          A         B
A  1.000000  0.995862
B  0.995862  1.000000

In the graphic you show, only the upper left corner of the correlation matrix is represented (I assume).

There can be cases, where you get NaNs in your solution – check this post for an example.

If you want to filter entries above/below a certain threshold, you can check this question. If you want to plot a heatmap of the correlation coefficients, you can check this answer and if you then run into the issue with overlapping axis-labels check the following post.

I ran into the same issue. It appeared Citable Documents per Person was a float, and python skips it somehow by default. All the other columns of my dataframe were in numpy-formats, so I solved it by converting the columnt to np.float64

Top15['Citable Documents per Person']=np.float64(Top15['Citable Documents per Person'])

Remember it’s exactly the column you calculated yourself

My solution would be after converting data to numerical type:

Top15[['Citable docs per Capita','Energy Supply per Capita']].corr()

If you want the correlations between all pairs of columns, you could do something like this:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

def get_corrs(df):
    col_correlations = df.corr()
    col_correlations.loc[:, :] = np.tril(col_correlations, k=-1)
    cor_pairs = col_correlations.stack()
    return cor_pairs.to_dict()

my_corrs = get_corrs(df)
# and the following line to retrieve the single correlation
print(my_corrs[('Citable docs per Capita','Energy Supply per Capita')])

When you call this:

data = Top15[['Citable docs per Capita','Energy Supply per Capita']]
correlation = data.corr(method='pearson')

Since, DataFrame.corr() function performs pair-wise correlations, you have four pair from two variables. So, basically you are getting diagonal values as auto correlation (correlation with itself, two values since you have two variables), and other two values as cross correlations of one vs another and vice versa.

Either perform correlation between two series to get a single value:

from scipy.stats.stats import pearsonr
docs_col = Top15['Citable docs per Capita'].values
energy_col = Top15['Energy Supply per Capita'].values
corr , _ = pearsonr(docs_col, energy_col)

or, if you want a single value from the same function (DataFrame’s corr):

single_value = correlation[0][1] 

Hope this helps.

It works like this:

Top15['Citable docs per Capita']=np.float64(Top15['Citable docs per Capita'])

Top15['Energy Supply per Capita']=np.float64(Top15['Energy Supply per Capita'])

Top15['Energy Supply per Capita'].corr(Top15['Citable docs per Capita'])

I solved this problem by changing the data type. If you see the ‘Energy Supply per Capita’ is a numerical type while the ‘Citable docs per Capita’ is an object type. I converted the column to float using astype. I had the same problem with some np functions: count_nonzero and sum worked while mean and std didn’t.

changing ‘Citable docs per Capita’ to numeric before correlation will solve the problem.

    Top15['Citable docs per Capita'] = pd.to_numeric(Top15['Citable docs per Capita'])
    data = Top15[['Citable docs per Capita','Energy Supply per Capita']]
    correlation = data.corr(method='pearson')

How do you find the top correlations in a correlation matrix with Pandas? There are many answers on how to do this with R (Show correlations as an ordered list, not as a large matrix or Efficient way to get highly correlated pairs from large data set in Python or R), but I am wondering how to do it with pandas? In my case the matrix is 4460×4460, so can’t do it visually.

You can use DataFrame.values to get an numpy array of the data and then use NumPy functions such as argsort() to get the most correlated pairs.

But if you want to do this in pandas, you can unstack and sort the DataFrame:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

shape = (50, 4460)

data = np.random.normal(size=shape)

data[:, 1000] += data[:, 2000]

df = pd.DataFrame(data)

c = df.corr().abs()

s = c.unstack()
so = s.sort_values(kind="quicksort")

print so[-4470:-4460]

Here is the output:

2192  1522    0.636198
1522  2192    0.636198
3677  2027    0.641817
2027  3677    0.641817
242   130     0.646760
130   242     0.646760
1171  2733    0.670048
2733  1171    0.670048
1000  2000    0.742340
2000  1000    0.742340
dtype: float64

@HYRY’s answer is perfect. Just building on that answer by adding a bit more logic to avoid duplicate and self correlations and proper sorting:

import pandas as pd
d = {'x1': [1, 4, 4, 5, 6], 
     'x2': [0, 0, 8, 2, 4], 
     'x3': [2, 8, 8, 10, 12], 
     'x4': [-1, -4, -4, -4, -5]}
df = pd.DataFrame(data = d)
print("Data Frame")
print(df)
print()

print("Correlation Matrix")
print(df.corr())
print()

def get_redundant_pairs(df):
    '''Get diagonal and lower triangular pairs of correlation matrix'''
    pairs_to_drop = set()
    cols = df.columns
    for i in range(0, df.shape[1]):
        for j in range(0, i+1):
            pairs_to_drop.add((cols[i], cols[j]))
    return pairs_to_drop

def get_top_abs_correlations(df, n=5):
    au_corr = df.corr().abs().unstack()
    labels_to_drop = get_redundant_pairs(df)
    au_corr = au_corr.drop(labels=labels_to_drop).sort_values(ascending=False)
    return au_corr[0:n]

print("Top Absolute Correlations")
print(get_top_abs_correlations(df, 3))

That gives the following output:

Data Frame
   x1  x2  x3  x4
0   1   0   2  -1
1   4   0   8  -4
2   4   8   8  -4
3   5   2  10  -4
4   6   4  12  -5

Correlation Matrix
          x1        x2        x3        x4
x1  1.000000  0.399298  1.000000 -0.969248
x2  0.399298  1.000000  0.399298 -0.472866
x3  1.000000  0.399298  1.000000 -0.969248
x4 -0.969248 -0.472866 -0.969248  1.000000

Top Absolute Correlations
x1  x3    1.000000
x3  x4    0.969248
x1  x4    0.969248
dtype: float64

Few lines solution without redundant pairs of variables:

corr_matrix = df.corr().abs()

#the matrix is symmetric so we need to extract upper triangle matrix without diagonal (k = 1)

sol = (corr_matrix.where(np.triu(np.ones(corr_matrix.shape), k=1).astype(np.bool))
                  .stack()
                  .sort_values(ascending=False))

#first element of sol series is the pair with the biggest correlation

Then you can iterate through names of variables pairs (which are pandas.Series multi-indexes) and theirs values like this:

for index, value in sol.items():
  # do some staff

Combining some features of @HYRY and @arun’s answers, you can print the top correlations for dataframe df in a single line using:

df.corr().unstack().sort_values().drop_duplicates()

Note: the one downside is if you have 1.0 correlations that are not one variable to itself, the drop_duplicates() addition would remove them

Use the code below to view the correlations in the descending order.

# See the correlations in descending order

corr = df.corr() # df is the pandas dataframe
c1 = corr.abs().unstack()
c1.sort_values(ascending = False)

You can do graphically according to this simple code by substituting your data.

corr = df.corr()

kot = corr[corr>=.9]
plt.figure(figsize=(12,8))
sns.heatmap(kot, cmap="Greens")

Lot’s of good answers here. The easiest way I found was a combination of some of the answers above.

corr = corr.where(np.triu(np.ones(corr.shape), k=1).astype(np.bool))
corr = corr.unstack().transpose()\
    .sort_values(by='column', ascending=False)\
    .dropna()

Use itertools.combinations to get all unique correlations from pandas own correlation matrix .corr(), generate list of lists and feed it back into a DataFrame in order to use ‘.sort_values’. Set ascending = True to display lowest correlations on top

corrank takes a DataFrame as argument because it requires .corr().

  def corrank(X: pandas.DataFrame):
        import itertools
        df = pd.DataFrame([[(i,j),X.corr().loc[i,j]] for i,j in list(itertools.combinations(X.corr(), 2))],columns=['pairs','corr'])    
        print(df.sort_values(by='corr',ascending=False))

  corrank(X) # prints a descending list of correlation pair (Max on top)

I didn’t want to unstack or over-complicate this issue, since I just wanted to drop some highly correlated features as part of a feature selection phase.

So I ended up with the following simplified solution:

# map features to their absolute correlation values
corr = features.corr().abs()

# set equality (self correlation) as zero
corr[corr == 1] = 0

# of each feature, find the max correlation
# and sort the resulting array in ascending order
corr_cols = corr.max().sort_values(ascending=False)

# display the highly correlated features
display(corr_cols[corr_cols > 0.8])

In this case, if you want to drop correlated features, you may map through the filtered corr_cols array and remove the odd-indexed (or even-indexed) ones.

I was trying some of the solutions here but then I actually came up with my own one. I hope this might be useful for the next one so I share it here:

def sort_correlation_matrix(correlation_matrix):
    cor = correlation_matrix.abs()
    top_col = cor[cor.columns[0]][1:]
    top_col = top_col.sort_values(ascending=False)
    ordered_columns = [cor.columns[0]] + top_col.index.tolist()
    return correlation_matrix[ordered_columns].reindex(ordered_columns)

This is a improve code from @MiFi. This one order in abs but not excluding the negative values.

   def top_correlation (df,n):
    corr_matrix = df.corr()
    correlation = (corr_matrix.where(np.triu(np.ones(corr_matrix.shape), k=1).astype(np.bool))
                 .stack()
                 .sort_values(ascending=False))
    correlation = pd.DataFrame(correlation).reset_index()
    correlation.columns=["Variable_1","Variable_2","Correlacion"]
    correlation = correlation.reindex(correlation.Correlacion.abs().sort_values(ascending=False).index).reset_index().drop(["index"],axis=1)
    return correlation.head(n)

top_correlation(ANYDATA,10)

The following function should do the trick. This implementation

• Removes self correlations
• Removes duplicates
• Enables the selection of top N highest correlated features

and it is also configurable so that you can keep both the self correlations as well as the duplicates. You can also to report as many feature pairs as you wish.

def get_feature_correlation(df, top_n=None, corr_method='spearman',
                            remove_duplicates=True, remove_self_correlations=True):
    """
    Compute the feature correlation and sort feature pairs based on their correlation

    :param df: The dataframe with the predictor variables
    :type df: pandas.core.frame.DataFrame
    :param top_n: Top N feature pairs to be reported (if None, all of the pairs will be returned)
    :param corr_method: Correlation compuation method
    :type corr_method: str
    :param remove_duplicates: Indicates whether duplicate features must be removed
    :type remove_duplicates: bool
    :param remove_self_correlations: Indicates whether self correlations will be removed
    :type remove_self_correlations: bool

    :return: pandas.core.frame.DataFrame
    """
    corr_matrix_abs = df.corr(method=corr_method).abs()
    corr_matrix_abs_us = corr_matrix_abs.unstack()
    sorted_correlated_features = corr_matrix_abs_us \
        .sort_values(kind="quicksort", ascending=False) \
        .reset_index()

    # Remove comparisons of the same feature
    if remove_self_correlations:
        sorted_correlated_features = sorted_correlated_features[
            (sorted_correlated_features.level_0 != sorted_correlated_features.level_1)
        ]

    # Remove duplicates
    if remove_duplicates:
        sorted_correlated_features = sorted_correlated_features.iloc[:-2:2]

    # Create meaningful names for the columns
    sorted_correlated_features.columns = ['Feature 1', 'Feature 2', 'Correlation (abs)']

    if top_n:
        return sorted_correlated_features[:top_n]

    return sorted_correlated_features

I liked Addison Klinke’s post the most, as being the simplest, but used Wojciech Moszczyńsk’s suggestion for filtering and charting, but extended the filter to avoid absolute values, so given a large correlation matrix, filter it, chart it, and then flatten it:

Created, Filtered and Charted

dfCorr = df.corr()
filteredDf = dfCorr[((dfCorr >= .5) | (dfCorr <= -.5)) & (dfCorr !=1.000)]
plt.figure(figsize=(30,10))
sn.heatmap(filteredDf, annot=True, cmap="Reds")
plt.show()

Function

In the end, I created a small function to create the correlation matrix, filter it, and then flatten it. As an idea, it could easily be extended, e.g., asymmetric upper and lower bounds, etc.

def corrFilter(x: pd.DataFrame, bound: float):
    xCorr = x.corr()
    xFiltered = xCorr[((xCorr >= bound) | (xCorr <= -bound)) & (xCorr !=1.000)]
    xFlattened = xFiltered.unstack().sort_values().drop_duplicates()
    return xFlattened

corrFilter(df, .7)