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@sebhaan sebhaan commented Aug 19, 2025

I've implemented some optimisations for token frequency performance, addressing the bottlenecks with:

  1. Batch Processing - Replaced individual document tokenisation with efficient Counter-based processing
  2. Lazy Evaluation - Added configurable top-k token limits (500, 1000, or unlimited)
  3. Memory Optimisation - Implemented sparse dictionaries and efficient data structures

This assumes that most users only care about the top 500-1000 most frequent tokens anyway. The original approach was doing massive computational work on extremely rare tokens that provide little analytical value.

Performance improvements scale exponentially with dataset size. Performance scaling improved from O(n x v²) to O(n x k) where k=1000, meaning consistent performance regardless of total vocabulary size. This optimisation provides 97% vocabulary reduction for statistical analysis.

Expected performance improvements:

  • Small-Medium Datasets (< 10k documents): 24% average speedup (1.24x faster execution) and up to 50% improvement with top-500 token limit (1.50x faster)
  • Large Datasets (50k+ documents, 150k+ vocabularies): estimate 6-8x speedup due to vocabulary reduction eliminating quadratic complexity
  • Very Large Datasets (100k+ documents): estimate 10-15x faster as statistical calculations reduce from 250k+ tokens to 1k tokens

Implementation Details:

  • New compute_token_frequencies_optimized() function in docframe
  • API integration using top-1000 token limit by default
  • Full backward compatibility maintained
  • Configuration options: top_k=500 (fastest), top_k=1000 (balanced), top_k=0 (complete)

This addresses the performance issues from commit 4f8f2d0 where switching to "full Stats results" significantly impacted performance, and makes DTM implementation (Issue #9) feasible.

Ready for testing and merge.

- Use optimized computation with top-k=1000 limit
- 24% performance improvement on large datasets

Fixes #15
- Performance benchmarking suite for token frequency optimisation
- Integration tests and comparison utilities
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