Is it possible to vectorize (or otherwise speedup) an element-wise optimization with NumPy (and SciPy)?
In the most abstract sense, I have a function, y, which is parabolically shaped and could be expressed basically as y=x^2+b*x+z, where x is an array of known values, and I want to find a z that makes the minimum value of y exactly zero (said another way, I want to find a value z that makes my parabola only have one zero). For this, I've chosen to implement a simple bisection-like method. The code for this is below:
import numpy as np
def find_single_root():
x = np.arange(-5, 6,0.1) # domain
z = 1 # initial guess
delta = 1 # initial step size
tol = 0.001 # tolerance
while True:
y = x**2-5*x+z
minimum = np.nanmin(y)
# update z
print(delta)
print(z)
if minimum > 0:
if delta > 0:
delta = -1*delta/2
z += delta
else:
if delta < 0:
delta = -1*delta/2
z += delta
# check if step is smaller than tolerance
if np.abs(delta) < tol:
return z
Now lets say x(v,w), and I want to create a 2D array of z values, where each is optimized. What I have right now is below (note, the new function definition and domain are as follows)
def find_single_root(v, w):
x = np.arange(-5*v/w, 6*w,0.1) # domain
... # rest of the function
vs = np.arange(1,5)
ws = np.arange(1,5)
zs = np.zeros((len(vs),len(ws)))
for i, v in enumerate(vs):
for j, w in enumerate(ws):
zs[i][j] = find_single_root(v,w)
Right now I just have these simple nested for loops, but is there a way I can approach this differently or speed it up with NumPy vectorizing?
Vectorization may be applicable when the computations to be performed are precisely known in advance. Like "take two arrays of numbers, and multiply them pairwise".
Vectorization is not applicable when the computations adapt to the given data. Any kind of optimization algorithm is adaptive, because where you look for the minimum depends on what the function returns. If you have a bunch of functions, and need to find the minimum of each, you are going to have to minimize them one at a time, in a loop. If this process is slow, it's because it takes long to minimize a bunch of function, not because there is a for loop in the program.
Concerning your program, I would try using some of SciPy methods for both minimization and root-finding. Have a function min_of_f(z) which finds the minimum for a given value of parameter z, possibly using minimize_scalar. Then feed min_of_f to a root-finding routine. How long these will take can be controlled by their tolerance parameters (xtol and others).
OP edit:
I wanted to give credit for this as a correct answer, but still provide more information.
I ended up using numpy.vectorize to vectorize without restructuring the problem. Although numpy.vectorize is not meant for increasing performance, the performance in my specific use case was a modest factor of two faster. Applying the same approach to the original problem in the question resulted in virtually no speed up with 100x100 vectors so YMMV.
Even though I wasn't able to vectorize this problem from a speed aspect for the reasons given in the above answer, being able to use plain vector syntax instead of nested for loops all over my code was useful.
Related
I have the following problem. I have a function f defined in python using numpy functions. The function is smooth and integrable on positive reals. I want to construct the double antiderivative of the function (assuming that both the value and the slope of the antiderivative at 0 are 0) so that I can evaluate it on any positive real smaller than 100.
Definition of antiderivative of f at x:
integrate f(s) with s from 0 to x
Definition of double antiderivative of f at x:
integrate (integrate f(t) with t from 0 to s) with s from 0 to x
The actual form of f is not important, so I will use a simple one for convenience. But please note that even though my example has a known closed form, my actual function does not.
import numpy as np
f = lambda x: np.exp(-x)*x
My solution is to construct the antiderivative as an array using naive numerical integration:
N = 10000
delta = 100/N
xs = np.linspace(0,100,N+1)
vs = f(xs)
avs = np.cumsum(vs)*delta
aavs = np.cumsum(avs)*delta
This of course works but it gives me arrays instead of functions. But this is not a big problem as I can interpolate aavs using a spline to get a function and get rid of the arrays.
from scipy.interpolate import UnivariateSpline
aaf = UnivariateSpline(xs, aavs)
The function aaf is approximately the double antiderivative of f.
The problem is that even though it works, there is quite a bit of overhead before I can get my function and precision is expensive.
My other idea was to interpolate f by a spline and take the antiderivative of that, however this introduces numerical errors that are too big for what I want to use the function.
Is there any better way to do that? By better I mean faster without sacrificing accuracy.
Edit: What I hope is possible is to use some kind of Fourier transform to avoid integrating twice. I hope that there is some convenient transform of vs that allows to multiply the values component-wise with xs and transform back to get the double antiderivative. I played with this a bit, but I got lost.
Edit: I figured out that by using the trapezoidal rule instead of a naive sum, increases the accuracy quite a bit. Using Simpson's rule should increase the accuracy further, but it's somewhat fiddly to do with numpy arrays.
Edit: As #user202729 rightfully complains, this seems off. The reason it seems off is because I have skipped some details. I explain here why what I say makes sense, but it does not affect my question.
My actual goal is not to find the double antiderivative of f, but to find a transformation of this. I have skipped that because I think it only confuses the matter.
The function f decays exponentially as x approaches 0 or infinity. I am minimizing the numerical error in the integration by starting the sum from 0 and going up to approximately the peak of f. This ensure that the relative error is approximately constant. Then I start from the opposite direction from some very big x and go back to the peak. Then I do the same for the antiderivative values.
Then I transform the aavs by another function which is sensitive to numerical errors. Then I find the region where the errors are big (the values oscillate violently) and drop these values. Finally I approximate what I believe are good values by a spline.
Now if I use spline to approximate f, it introduces an absolute error which is the dominant term in a rather large interval. This gets "integrated" twice and it ends up being a rather large relative error in aavs. Then once I transform aavs, I find that the 'good region' has shrunk considerably.
EDIT: The actual form of f is something I'm still looking into. However, it is going to be a generalisation of the lognormal distribution. Right now I am playing with the following family.
I start by defining a generalization of the normal distribution:
def pdf_n(params, center=0.0, slope=8):
scale, min, diff = params
if diff > 0:
r = min
l = min + diff
else:
r = min - diff
l = min
def retfun(m):
x = (m - center)/scale
E = special.expit(slope*x)*(r - l) + l
return np.exp( -np.power(1 + x*x, E)/2 )
return np.vectorize(retfun)
It may not be obvious what is happening here, but the result is quite simple. The function decays as exp(-x^(2l)) on the left and as exp(-x^(2r)) on the right. For min=1 and diff=0, this is the normal distribution. Note that this is not normalized. Then I define
g = pdf(params)
f = np.vectorize(lambda x:g(np.log(x))/x/area)
where area is the normalization constant.
Note that this is not the actual code I use. I stripped it down to the bare minimum.
You can compute the two np.cumsum (and the divisions) at once more efficiently using Numba. This is significantly faster since there is no need for several temporary arrays to be allocated, filled, read again and freed. Here is a naive implementation:
import numba as nb
#nb.njit('float64[::1](float64[::1], float64)') # Assume vs is contiguous
def doubleAntiderivative_naive(vs, delta):
res = np.empty(vs.size, dtype=np.float64)
sum1, sum2 = 0.0, 0.0
for i in range(vs.size):
sum1 += vs[i] * delta
sum2 += sum1 * delta
res[i] = sum2
return res
However, the sum is not very good in term of numerical stability. A Kahan summation is needed to improve the accuracy (or possibly the alternative Kahan–Babuška-Klein algorithm if you are paranoid about the accuracy and performance do not matter so much). Note that Numpy use a pair-wise algorithm which is quite good but far from being prefect in term of accuracy (this is a good compromise for both performance and accuracy).
Moreover, delta can be factorized during in the summation (ie. the result just need to be premultiplied by delta**2).
Here is an implementation using the more accurate Kahan summation:
#nb.njit('float64[::1](float64[::1], float64)')
def doubleAntiderivative_accurate(vs, delta):
res = np.empty(vs.size, dtype=np.float64)
delta2 = delta * delta
sum1, sum2 = 0.0, 0.0
c1, c2 = 0.0, 0.0
for i in range(vs.size):
# Kahan summation of the antiderivative of vs
y1 = vs[i] - c1
t1 = sum1 + y1
c1 = (t1 - sum1) - y1
sum1 = t1
# Kahan summation of the double antiderivative of vs
y2 = sum1 - c2
t2 = sum2 + y2
c2 = (t2 - sum2) - y2
sum2 = t2
res[i] = sum2 * delta2
return res
Here is the performance of the approaches on my machine (with an i5-9600KF processor):
Numpy cumsum: 51.3 us
Naive Numba: 11.6 us
Accutate Numba: 37.2 us
Here is the relative error of the approaches (based on the provided input function):
Numpy cumsum: 1e-13
Naive Numba: 5e-14
Accutate Numba: 2e-16
Perfect precision: 1e-16 (assuming 64-bit numbers are used)
If f can be easily computed using Numba (this is the case here), then vs[i] can be replaced by calls to f (inlined by Numba). This helps to reduce the memory consumption of the computation (N can be huge without saturating your RAM).
As for the interpolation, the splines often gives good numerical result but they are quite expensive to compute and AFAIK they require the whole array to be computed (each item of the array impact all the spline although some items may have a negligible impact alone). Regarding your needs, you could consider using Lagrange polynomials. You should be careful when using Lagrange polynomials on the edges. In your case, you can easily solve the numerical divergence issue on the edges by extending the array size with the border values (since you know the derivative on each edges of vs is 0). You can apply the interpolation on the fly with this method which can be good for both performance (typically if the computation is parallelized) and memory usage.
First, I created a version of the code I found more intuitive. Here I multiply cumulative sum values by bin widths. I believe there is a small error in the original version of the code related to the bin width issue.
import numpy as np
f = lambda x: np.exp(-x)*x
N = 1000
xs = np.linspace(0,100,N+1)
domainwidth = ( np.max(xs) - np.min(xs) )
binwidth = domainwidth / N
vs = f(xs)
avs = np.cumsum(vs)*binwidth
aavs = np.cumsum(avs)*binwidth
Next, for visualization here is some very simple plotting code:
import matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.figure()
plt.scatter( xs, vs )
plt.figure()
plt.scatter( xs, avs )
plt.figure()
plt.scatter( xs, aavs )
plt.show()
The first integral matches the known result of the example expression and can be seen on wolfram
Below is a simple function that extracts an element from the second derivative. Note that int is a bad rounding function. I assume this is what you have implemented already.
def extract_double_antideriv_value(x):
return aavs[int(x/binwidth)]
singleresult = extract_double_antideriv_value(50.24)
print('singleresult', singleresult)
Whatever full computation steps are required, we need to know them before we can start optimizing. Do you have a million different functions to integrate? If you only need to query a single double anti-derivative many times, your original solution should be fairly ideal.
Symbolic Approximation:
Have you considered approximations to the original function f, which can have closed form integration solutions? You have a limited domain on which the function lives. Perhaps approximate f with a Taylor series (which can be constructed with known maximum error) then integrate exactly? (consider Pade, Taylor, Fourier, Cheby, Lagrange(as suggested by another answer), etc...)
Log Tricks:
Another alternative to dealing with spiky errors, would be to take the log of your original function. Is f always positive? Is the integration error caused because the neighborhood around the max is very small? If so, you can study ln(f) or even ln(ln(f)) instead. It would really help to understand what f looks like more.
Approximation Integration Tricks
There exist countless integration tricks in general, which can make approximate closed form solutions to undo-able integrals. A very common one when exponetnial functions are involved (I think yours is expoential?) is to use Laplace's Method. But which trick to pull out of the bag is highly dependent upon the conditions which f satisfies.
I'm facing a problem while trying to implement the coupled differential equation below (also known as single-mode coupling equation) in Python 3.8.3. As for the solver, I am using Scipy's function scipy.integrate.solve_bvp, whose documentation can be read here. I want to solve the equations in the complex domain, for different values of the propagation axis (z) and different values of beta (beta_analysis).
The problem is that it is extremely slow (not manageable) compared with an equivalent implementation in Matlab using the functions bvp4c, bvpinit and bvpset. Evaluating the first few iterations of both executions, they return the same result, except for the resulting mesh which is a lot greater in the case of Scipy. The mesh sometimes even saturates to the maximum value.
The equation to be solved is shown here below, along with the boundary conditions function.
import h5py
import numpy as np
from scipy import integrate
def coupling_equation(z_mesh, a):
ka_z = k # Global
z_a = z # Global
a_p = np.empty_like(a).astype(complex)
for idx, z_i in enumerate(z_mesh):
beta_zf_i = np.interp(z_i, z_a, beta_zf) # Get beta at the desired point of the mesh
ka_z_i = np.interp(z_i, z_a, ka_z) # Get ka at the desired point of the mesh
coupling_matrix = np.empty((2, 2), complex)
coupling_matrix[0] = [-1j * beta_zf_i, ka_z_i]
coupling_matrix[1] = [ka_z_i, 1j * beta_zf_i]
a_p[:, idx] = np.matmul(coupling_matrix, a[:, idx]) # Solve the coupling matrix
return a_p
def boundary_conditions(a_a, a_b):
return np.hstack(((a_a[0]-1), a_b[1]))
Moreover, I couldn't find a way to pass k, z and beta_zf as arguments of the function coupling_equation, given that the fun argument of the solve_bpv function must be a callable with the parameters (x, y). My approach is to define some global variables, but I would appreciate any help on this too if there is a better solution.
The analysis function which I am trying to code is:
def analysis(k, z, beta_analysis, max_mesh):
s11_analysis = np.empty_like(beta_analysis, dtype=complex)
s21_analysis = np.empty_like(beta_analysis, dtype=complex)
initial_mesh = np.linspace(z[0], z[-1], 10) # Initial mesh of 10 samples along L
mesh = initial_mesh
# a_init must be complex in order to solve the problem in a complex domain
a_init = np.vstack((np.ones(np.size(initial_mesh)).astype(complex),
np.zeros(np.size(initial_mesh)).astype(complex)))
for idx, beta in enumerate(beta_analysis):
print(f"Iteration {idx}: beta_analysis = {beta}")
global beta_zf
beta_zf = beta * np.ones(len(z)) # Global variable so as to use it in coupling_equation(x, y)
a = integrate.solve_bvp(fun=coupling_equation,
bc=boundary_conditions,
x=mesh,
y=a_init,
max_nodes=max_mesh,
verbose=1)
# mesh = a.x # Mesh for the next iteration
# a_init = a.y # Initial guess for the next iteration, corresponding to the current solution
s11_analysis[idx] = a.y[1][0]
s21_analysis[idx] = a.y[0][-1]
return s11_analysis, s21_analysis
I suspect that the problem has something to do with the initial guess that is being passed to the different iterations (see commented lines inside the loop in the analysis function). I try to set the solution of an iteration as the initial guess for the following (which must reduce the time needed for the solver), but it is even slower, which I don't understand. Maybe I missed something, because it is my first time trying to solve differential equations.
The parameters used for the execution are the following:
f2 = h5py.File(r'path/to/file', 'r')
k = np.array(f2['k']).squeeze()
z = np.array(f2['z']).squeeze()
f2.close()
analysis_points = 501
max_mesh = 1e6
beta_0 = 3e2;
beta_low = 0; # Lower value of the frequency for the analysis
beta_up = beta_0; # Upper value of the frequency for the analysis
beta_analysis = np.linspace(beta_low, beta_up, analysis_points);
s11_analysis, s21_analysis = analysis(k, z, beta_analysis, max_mesh)
Any ideas on how to improve the performance of these functions? Thank you all in advance, and sorry if the question is not well-formulated, I accept any suggestions about this.
Edit: Added some information about performance and sizing of the problem.
In practice, I can't find a relation that determines de number of times coupling_equation is called. It must be a matter of the internal operation of the solver. I checked the number of callings in one iteration by printing a line, and it happened in 133 ocasions (this was one of the fastests). This must be multiplied by the number of iterations of beta. For the analyzed one, the solver returned this:
Solved in 11 iterations, number of nodes 529.
Maximum relative residual: 9.99e-04
Maximum boundary residual: 0.00e+00
The shapes of a and z_mesh are correlated, since z_mesh is a vector whose length corresponds with the size of the mesh, recalculated by the solver each time it calls coupling_equation. Given that a contains the amplitudes of the progressive and regressive waves at each point of z_mesh, the shape of a is (2, len(z_mesh)).
In terms of computation times, I only managed to achieve 19 iterations in about 2 hours with Python. In this case, the initial iterations were faster, but they start to take more time as their mesh grows, until the point that the mesh saturates to the maximum allowed value. I think this is because of the value of the input coupling coefficients in that point, because it also happens when no loop in beta_analysisis executed (just the solve_bvp function for the intermediate value of beta). Instead, Matlab managed to return a solution for the entire problem in just 6 minutes, aproximately. If I pass the result of the last iteration as initial_guess (commented lines in the analysis function, the mesh overflows even faster and it is impossible to get more than a couple iterations.
Based on semi-random inputs, we can see that max_mesh is sometimes reached. This means that coupling_equation can be called with a quite big z_mesh and a arrays. The problem is that coupling_equation contains a slow pure-Python loop iterating on each column of the arrays. You can speed the computation up a lot using Numpy vectorization. Here is an implementation:
def coupling_equation_fast(z_mesh, a):
ka_z = k # Global
z_a = z # Global
a_p = np.empty(a.shape, dtype=np.complex128)
beta_zf_i = np.interp(z_mesh, z_a, beta_zf) # Get beta at the desired point of the mesh
ka_z_i = np.interp(z_mesh, z_a, ka_z) # Get ka at the desired point of the mesh
# Fast manual matrix multiplication
a_p[0] = (-1j * beta_zf_i) * a[0] + ka_z_i * a[1]
a_p[1] = ka_z_i * a[0] + (1j * beta_zf_i) * a[1]
return a_p
This code provides a similar output with semi-random inputs compared to the original implementation but is roughly 20 times faster on my machine.
Furthermore, I do not know if max_mesh happens to be big with your inputs too and even if this is normal/intended. It may make sense to decrease the value of max_mesh in order to reduce the execution time even more.
I have a weighted moving average function which smooths a curve by averaging 3*width values to the left and to the right of each point using a gaussian weighting mechanism. I am only worried about smoothing a region bounded by [start, end]. The following code works, but the problem is runtime with large arrays.
import numpy as np
def weighted_moving_average(x, y, start, end, width = 3):
def gaussian(x, a, m, s):
return a*exp(-(x-m)**2/(2*s**2))
cut = (x>=start-3*width)*(x<=end+3*width)
x, y = x[cut], y[cut]
x_avg = x[(x>=start)*(x<=end)]
y_avg = np.zeros(len(x_avg))
bin_vals = np.arange(-3*width,3*width+1)
weights = gaussian(bin_vals, 1, 0, width)
for i in range(len(x_avg)):
y_vals = y[i:i+6*width+1]
y_avg[i] = np.average(y_vals, weights = weights)
return x_avg, y_avg
From my understanding, it is generally inefficient to loop through a NumPy array. I was wondering if anyone had an idea to replace the for loop with something more runtime efficient.
Thanks
That slicing and summing/averaging on a weighted window basically corresponds to 1D convolution with the kernel being flipped. Now, for 1D convolution, NumPy has a very efficient implementation in np.convolve and that could be used to get rid of the loop and give us y_avg. Thus, we would have a vectorized implementation like so -
y_sums = np.convolve(y,weights[::-1],'valid')
y_avg = np.true_divide(y_sums,weights.sum())
The main concern with looping over a large array is that the memory allocation for the large array can be expensive, and the whole thing has to be initialized before the loop can start.
In this particular case I'd go with what Divakar is saying.
In general, if you find yourself in a circumstance where you really need to iterate over a large collection, use iterators instead of arrays. For a relatively simple case like this, just replace range with xrange (see https://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#xrange).
I am relatively new to python and am interested in any ideas to optimize and speed up this function. I have to call it tens~hundreds of thousands of times for a numerical computation I am doing and it takes a major fraction of the code's overall computational time.
I have written this in c, but I am interested to see any tricks to make it run faster in python specifically.
This code calculates a stereographic projection of a bigD-length vector to a littleD-length vector, per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereographic_projection. The variable a is a numpy array of length ~ 96.
import numpy as np
def nsphere(a):
bigD = len(a)
littleD = 3
temp = a
# normalize before calculating projection
temp = temp/np.sqrt(np.dot(temp,temp))
# calculate projection
for i in xrange(bigD-littleD + 2,2,-1 ):
temp = temp[0:-1]/(1.0 - temp[-1])
return temp
#USAGE:
q = np.random.rand(96)
b = nsphere(q)
print b
This should be faster:
def nsphere(a, littleD=3):
a = a / np.sqrt(np.dot(a, a))
z = a[littleD:].sum()
return a[:littleD] / (1. - z)
Please do the math to double check that this is in fact the same as your iterative algorithm.
Obviously the main speedup here is going to come from the fact that this is a O(n) algorithm that replaces your O(n**2) algorithm for computing the projection. But specifically to speeding things up in python, you want to "vectorize your inner loop". Meaning try and avoid loops and anything else that is going to have high python overhead in the most performance critical parts of your code and instead try and use python and numpy builtins which are highly optimized. Hope that helps.
I'm trying to interpolate some data for the purpose of plotting. For instance, given N data points, I'd like to be able to generate a "smooth" plot, made up of 10*N or so interpolated data points.
My approach is to generate an N-by-10*N matrix and compute the inner product the original vector and the matrix I generated, yielding a 1-by-10*N vector. I've already worked out the math I'd like to use for the interpolation, but my code is pretty slow. I'm pretty new to Python, so I'm hopeful that some of the experts here can give me some ideas of ways I can try to speed up my code.
I think part of the problem is that generating the matrix requires 10*N^2 calls to the following function:
def sinc(x):
import math
try:
return math.sin(math.pi * x) / (math.pi * x)
except ZeroDivisionError:
return 1.0
(This comes from sampling theory. Essentially, I'm attempting to recreate a signal from its samples, and upsample it to a higher frequency.)
The matrix is generated by the following:
def resampleMatrix(Tso, Tsf, o, f):
from numpy import array as npar
retval = []
for i in range(f):
retval.append([sinc((Tsf*i - Tso*j)/Tso) for j in range(o)])
return npar(retval)
I'm considering breaking up the task into smaller pieces because I don't like the idea of an N^2 matrix sitting in memory. I could probably make 'resampleMatrix' into a generator function and do the inner product row-by-row, but I don't think that will speed up my code much until I start paging stuff in and out of memory.
Thanks in advance for your suggestions!
This is upsampling. See Help with resampling/upsampling for some example solutions.
A fast way to do this (for offline data, like your plotting application) is to use FFTs. This is what SciPy's native resample() function does. It assumes a periodic signal, though, so it's not exactly the same. See this reference:
Here’s the second issue regarding time-domain real signal interpolation, and it’s a big deal indeed. This exact interpolation algorithm provides correct results only if the original x(n) sequence is periodic within its full time interval.
Your function assumes the signal's samples are all 0 outside of the defined range, so the two methods will diverge away from the center point. If you pad the signal with lots of zeros first, it will produce a very close result. There are several more zeros past the edge of the plot not shown here:
Cubic interpolation won't be correct for resampling purposes. This example is an extreme case (near the sampling frequency), but as you can see, cubic interpolation isn't even close. For lower frequencies it should be pretty accurate.
If you want to interpolate data in a quite general and fast way, splines or polynomials are very useful. Scipy has the scipy.interpolate module, which is very useful. You can find many examples in the official pages.
Your question isn't entirely clear; you're trying to optimize the code you posted, right?
Re-writing sinc like this should speed it up considerably. This implementation avoids checking that the math module is imported on every call, doesn't do attribute access three times, and replaces exception handling with a conditional expression:
from math import sin, pi
def sinc(x):
return (sin(pi * x) / (pi * x)) if x != 0 else 1.0
You could also try avoiding creating the matrix twice (and holding it twice in parallel in memory) by creating a numpy.array directly (not from a list of lists):
def resampleMatrix(Tso, Tsf, o, f):
retval = numpy.zeros((f, o))
for i in xrange(f):
for j in xrange(o):
retval[i][j] = sinc((Tsf*i - Tso*j)/Tso)
return retval
(replace xrange with range on Python 3.0 and above)
Finally, you can create rows with numpy.arange as well as calling numpy.sinc on each row or even on the entire matrix:
def resampleMatrix(Tso, Tsf, o, f):
retval = numpy.zeros((f, o))
for i in xrange(f):
retval[i] = numpy.arange(Tsf*i / Tso, Tsf*i / Tso - o, -1.0)
return numpy.sinc(retval)
This should be significantly faster than your original implementation. Try different combinations of these ideas and test their performance, see which works out the best!
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to do, but there are some speedups you can do to create the matrix. Braincore's suggestion to use numpy.sinc is a first step, but the second is to realize that numpy functions want to work on numpy arrays, where they can do loops at C speen, and can do it faster than on individual elements.
def resampleMatrix(Tso, Tsf, o, f):
retval = numpy.sinc((Tsi*numpy.arange(i)[:,numpy.newaxis]
-Tso*numpy.arange(j)[numpy.newaxis,:])/Tso)
return retval
The trick is that by indexing the aranges with the numpy.newaxis, numpy converts the array with shape i to one with shape i x 1, and the array with shape j, to shape 1 x j. At the subtraction step, numpy will "broadcast" the each input to act as a i x j shaped array and the do the subtraction. ("Broadcast" is numpy's term, reflecting the fact no additional copy is made to stretch the i x 1 to i x j.)
Now the numpy.sinc can iterate over all the elements in compiled code, much quicker than any for-loop you could write.
(There's an additional speed-up available if you do the division before the subtraction, especially since inthe latter the division cancels the multiplication.)
The only drawback is that you now pay for an extra Nx10*N array to hold the difference. This might be a dealbreaker if N is large and memory is an issue.
Otherwise, you should be able to write this using numpy.convolve. From what little I just learned about sinc-interpolation, I'd say you want something like numpy.convolve(orig,numpy.sinc(numpy.arange(j)),mode="same"). But I'm probably wrong about the specifics.
If your only interest is to 'generate a "smooth" plot' I would just go with a simple polynomial spline curve fit:
For any two adjacent data points the coefficients of a third degree polynomial function can be computed from the coordinates of those data points and the two additional points to their left and right (disregarding boundary points.) This will generate points on a nice smooth curve with a continuous first dirivitive. There's a straight forward formula for converting 4 coordinates to 4 polynomial coefficients but I don't want to deprive you of the fun of looking it up ;o).
Here's a minimal example of 1d interpolation with scipy -- not as much fun as reinventing, but.
The plot looks like sinc, which is no coincidence:
try google spline resample "approximate sinc".
(Presumably less local / more taps ⇒ better approximation,
but I have no idea how local UnivariateSplines are.)
""" interpolate with scipy.interpolate.UnivariateSpline """
from __future__ import division
import numpy as np
from scipy.interpolate import UnivariateSpline
import pylab as pl
N = 10
H = 8
x = np.arange(N+1)
xup = np.arange( 0, N, 1/H )
y = np.zeros(N+1); y[N//2] = 100
interpolator = UnivariateSpline( x, y, k=3, s=0 ) # s=0 interpolates
yup = interpolator( xup )
np.set_printoptions( 1, threshold=100, suppress=True ) # .1f
print "yup:", yup
pl.plot( x, y, "green", xup, yup, "blue" )
pl.show()
Added feb 2010: see also basic-spline-interpolation-in-a-few-lines-of-numpy
Small improvement. Use the built-in numpy.sinc(x) function which runs in compiled C code.
Possible larger improvement: Can you do the interpolation on the fly (as the plotting occurs)? Or are you tied to a plotting library that only accepts a matrix?
I recommend that you check your algorithm, as it is a non-trivial problem. Specifically, I suggest you gain access to the article "Function Plotting Using Conic Splines" (IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications) by Hu and Pavlidis (1991). Their algorithm implementation allows for adaptive sampling of the function, such that the rendering time is smaller than with regularly spaced approaches.
The abstract follows:
A method is presented whereby, given a
mathematical description of a
function, a conic spline approximating
the plot of the function is produced.
Conic arcs were selected as the
primitive curves because there are
simple incremental plotting algorithms
for conics already included in some
device drivers, and there are simple
algorithms for local approximations by
conics. A split-and-merge algorithm
for choosing the knots adaptively,
according to shape analysis of the
original function based on its
first-order derivatives, is
introduced.