interlap: fast, simple interval overlap testing

## Project description

InterLap: simple, fast interval overlap testing
-----------------------------------------------

InterLap is >20 times faster than doing a naive search (see: brentp.github.io/interlap/bench.html)
with **no memory overhead** because it operates on a sorted list. It is pure python and has no
dependencies.

It uses binary search and a knowledge of the longest observed interval to quickly query datasets
with 100's of thousands of intervals.

See the documentation at [https://brentp.github.io/interlap/](https://brentp.github.io/interlap)

Usage
-----

Interlap takes tuples or lists where the first 2 elements are start, end and the remaining
elements can be anything.

Python
>>> from interlap import InterLap
>>> inter = InterLap()

#Here create 10K random intervals:

>>> import random
>>> random.seed(42)
>>> sites = random.sample(range(22, 100000000, 12), 50000)
>>> ranges = [(i, i + random.randint(2000, 20000)) for i in sites]

>>> inter.update(ranges)

>>> [20, 21] in inter
True

>>> next(inter.find((21, 21)))
(20, 22, {'info': 'hi'})

*NOTE*: below shows how edge-cases are handled.
>>> list(inter.find((2, 2)))
[(2, 3, {'info': 'hello'})]
>>> list(inter.find((3, 3)))
[(2, 3, {'info': 'hello'})]

Test every item in the InterLap. These 50K queries take < 0.5 seconds:

>>> for s, e in ranges:
... assert (s, e) in inter



Installation
------------

Shell

pip install interlap



Example
-------

In general, we will want one interlap per chromosome for genomic data.
The snippet below shows a simple way to do that in the process of creating
and then querying some intervals.

Python

from interlap import InterLap
from collections import defaultdict
import sys

# use defaultdict to key by chromosome.
inter = defaultdict(InterLap)

for toks in (x.rstrip().split("\t") for x in open(sys.argv[1])):
start, end = map(int, toks[1:3])

# now find overlaps in another file:

for toks in (x.rstrip().split("\t") for x in open(sys.argv[2])):
start, end = map(int, toks[1:3])

print list(inter[toks[0]].find((start, end)))



Why
---

I am aware of bx-python's interval tree (I wrote the cython version)
but for some projects it is nice to have a simple dependency (or no
dependency since this can be included as a single file or 30 lines
of code) when we just need something a bit better than naive overlap
testing.

In my testing, the method implemented here, using a sorted list and keeping
track of the longest observed interval is the fastest *pure python* method
*as long as the longest observed interval is does not cover a substantial
fraction of intervals in the set*.

## Project details

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