Potential performance issue: .apply slow in pandas 1.4.0

[TendouArisu]

Issue Description:

Hello.
I have discovered a performance degradation in the .apply function of pandas version below 1.5. And I notice the repository depends on pandas 1.4.0 requirements.txt. I am not sure whether this performance problem in pandas will affect this repository. I found some discussions on pandas GitHub related to this issue, including #44172 and #45404.
I also found that alphamap/preprocessing.py and alphamap/importing.py used the influenced api. There may be more files using the influenced api and more parts using pandas 1.4.0.

Suggestion

I would recommend considering an upgrade to a different version of pandas >= 1.5 or exploring other solutions to optimize the performance of .apply.
Any other workarounds or solutions would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!