Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Enhancement: allow iterating signals in chunks of dataframes

Open
#436 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
data

Research direction

Start with the to_dataframe() implementation introduced in pull request 380 and review how it currently loads waveform signals. Define an approach for lazy, chunked dataframe processing that avoids loading the full signal into memory; done means large records such as those from MIMIC-III can be processed in memory-sized parts.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I'm using the new to_dataframe() function that was implemented in https://github.com/MIT-LCP/wfdb-python/pull/380

One issue that I'm seeing is that when loading some of the waveform signals from https://physionet.org/content/mimic3wdb-matched/1.0/ using to_dataframe() it eats up a lot of memory. Specifically, on the machine I'm running on which has 96gb of memory, reading the record and calling to_dataframe runs out of memory.

I would like to lazy load the signal data into a chunked dataframe which would allow me to process the waveform signals in parts that could fit into memory, rather than loading it all into memory.

Dominant language
Jupyter Notebook
Stars
853
Forks
322
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from MIT-LCP/wfdb-python

All issues in MIT-LCP/wfdb-python

Similar issues

More Data Engineering issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.