I have to solve a large amount of linear matrix equations of the type "Ax=B" for x where A is a sparse matrix with mainly the main diagonal populated and B is a vector.
My first approach was to use dense numpy arrays for this purpose with numpy.linalg.solve, and it works fine with a (N,n,n)-dimensional array with N being the number of linear matrix equations and n the square matrix dimension. I first used it with a for loop iterating through all equations, which in fact is rather slow. But then realized that you can also pass the (N,n,n)-dimensional matrix directly to numpy.linalg.solve without any for loop (which by the way I did not find in the documentation I read). This already gave a good increase in computation speed (details see below).
However, because I have sparse matrices, I also had a look at the scipy.sparse.linalg.spsolve function which does similar things like the corresponding numpy function. Using a for loop iterating through all equations is much, much faster than the numpy solution, but it seems impossible to pass the (N,n,n)-dimesional array directly to scipy´s spsolve.
Here is what I tried so far:
First, I calculate some fictional A matrices and B vectors with random numbers for test purposes, both sparse and dense:
import numpy as np
from scipy import sparse
from scipy.sparse.linalg import spsolvenumber_of_systems = 100 #corresponds to N in the text
number_of_data_points = 1000 #corresponds to n in the text#calculation of sample matrices (dense and sparse)
A_sparse = np.empty(number_of_systems,dtype=object)
A_dense = np.empty((number_of_systems,number_of_data_points,number_of_data_points))for ii in np.arange(number_of_systems):A_sparse[ii] = sparse.spdiags(np.random.random(number_of_data_points),0,number_of_data_points,number_of_data_points)A_dense[ii] = A_sparse[ii].todense()#calculation of sample vectors
B = np.random.random((number_of_systems,number_of_data_points))
1) First approach: numpy.linalg.solve with for loop:
def solve_dense_3D(A,B):results = np.empty((A.shape[0],A.shape[1]))for ii in np.arange(A.shape[0]):results[ii] = np.linalg.solve(A[ii],B[ii])return resultsresult_dense_for = solve_dense_3D(A_dense,B)
Timing:
timeit(solve_dense_3D(A_dense,B))
1.25 s ± 27.6 ms per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1 loop each)
2) Second approach: Passing the (N,n,n)-dimensional matrix directly to numpy.linalg.solve:
result_dense = np.linalg.solve(A_dense,B)
Timing:
timeit(np.linalg.solve(A_dense,B))
769 ms ± 9.68 ms per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1 loop each)
3) Third approach: Using scipy.sparse.linalg.spsolve with a for loop:
def solve_sparse_3D(A,B):results = np.empty((A.shape[0],A[0].shape[0]))for ii in np.arange(A.shape[0]):results[ii] = spsolve(A[ii],B[ii])return resultsresult_sparse_for = solve_sparse_3D(A_sparse,B)
Timing:
timeit(solve_sparse_3D(A_sparse,B))
30.9 ms ± 132 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10 loops each)
It is obvoius that there is an advantage being able to omit the for loop from approach 1 and 2. By far the fastest alternative is, as could probably be expected, approach 3 with sparse matrices.
Because the number of equations in this example is still rather low for me and because I have to do things like that very often, I would be happy if there was a solution using scipy´s sparse matrices without a for loop. Is anybody aware of a way to achieve that? Or maybe there is another way to solve the problem in an even different way? I would be happy for suggestions.