Yeah, Pandas would provide a pretty big improvement, but I wonder how much of an improvement one could get even by just replacing the c-style loop: > for qs in

Yeah, Pandas would provide a pretty big improvement, but I wonder how much of an improvement one could get even by just replacing the c-style loop: > for qs in combinations(all_qs, K): > > ... > > corrs.append({'qs': qs, 'r': r}) > > corrs.sort_values(...) with a python style list comprehension: > def build_q(combination): > > ... > > return {'qs': qs, 'r': r} > > max(build_q(c) for c in combinations(all_qs, K), key = lambda v: v['r'])