Finding those elements in an array which are "close" - numpy

Question

I have an 1 dimensional sorted array and would like to find all pairs of elements whose difference is no larger than 5.
A naive approach would to be to make N^2 comparisons doing something like
diffs = np.tile(x, (x.size,1) ) - x[:, np.newaxis]
D = np.logical_and(diffs>0, diffs<5)
indicies = np.argwhere(D)
Note here that the output of my example are indices of x. If I wanted the values of x which satisfy the criteria, I could do x[indicies].
This works for smaller arrays, but not arrays of the size with which I work.
An idea I had was to find where there are gaps larger than 5 between consecutive elements. I would split the array into two pieces, and compare all the elements in each piece.
Is this a more efficient way of finding elements which satisfy my criteria? How could I go about writing this?
Here is a small example:
x = np.array([ 9, 12,
21,
36, 39, 44, 46, 47,
58,
64, 65,])
the result should look like
array([[ 0, 1],
[ 3, 4],
[ 5, 6],
[ 5, 7],
[ 6, 7],
[ 9, 10]], dtype=int64)

Answer 1

Here is a solution that iterates over offsets while shrinking the set of candidates until there are none left:
import numpy as np
def f_pp(A, maxgap):
d0 = np.diff(A)
d = d0.copy()
IDX = []
k = 1
idx, = np.where(d <= maxgap)
vidx = idx[d[idx] > 0]
while vidx.size:
IDX.append(vidx[:, None] + (0, k))
if idx[-1] + k + 1 == A.size:
idx = idx[:-1]
d[idx] = d[idx] + d0[idx+k]
k += 1
idx = idx[d[idx] <= maxgap]
vidx = idx[d[idx] > 0]
return np.concatenate(IDX, axis=0)
data = np.cumsum(np.random.exponential(size=10000)).repeat(np.random.randint(1, 20, (10000,)))
pairs = f_pp(data, 1)
#pairs = set(map(tuple, pairs))
from timeit import timeit
kwds = dict(globals=globals(), number=100)
print(data.size, 'points', pairs.shape[0], 'close pairs')
print('pp', timeit("f_pp(data, 1)", **kwds)*10, 'ms')
Sample run:
99963 points 1020651 close pairs
pp 43.00256529124454 ms

Answer 2

Your idea of slicing the array is a very efficient approach. Since your data are sorted you can just calculate the difference and split it:
d=np.diff(x)
ind=np.where(d>5)[0]
pieces=np.split(x,ind)
Here pieces is a list, where you can then use in a loop with your own code on every element.
The best algorithm is highly dependent on the nature of your data which I'm unaware. For example another possibility is to write a nested loop:
pairs=[]
for i in range(x.size):
j=i+1
while x[j]-x[i]<=5 and j<x.size:
pairs.append([i,j])
j+=1
If you want it to be more clever, you can edit the outer loop in a way to jump when j hits a gap.