23
votes

Is there support for sparse matrices in python?

Possibly in numpy or in scipy?

2

2 Answers

41
votes

Yes.

SciPi provides scipy.sparse, a "2-D sparse matrix package for numeric data".

There are seven available sparse matrix types:

  1. csc_matrix: Compressed Sparse Column format
  2. csr_matrix: Compressed Sparse Row format
  3. bsr_matrix: Block Sparse Row format
  4. lil_matrix: List of Lists format
  5. dok_matrix: Dictionary of Keys format
  6. coo_matrix: COOrdinate format (aka IJV, triplet format)
  7. dia_matrix: DIAgonal format