List Highest Correlation Pairs from a Large Correlation Matrix in Pandas?

@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

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

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(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