[Numpy-discussion] Sparse matrix hooks

[Ed Schofield]

Pearu Peterson wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Feb 2006, Ed Schofield wrote:
>
>> I'm trying to improve integration between SciPy's sparse matrices and
>> NumPy's dense array/matrix objects.  One problem I'm facing is that
>> NumPy matrices redefine the * operator to call NumPy's dot() function.
>> Since dot() has no awareness of SciPy's sparse matrix objects, this
>> doesn't work for the operation 'dense * sparse'.  (It does work for
>> sparse * dense, which calls sparse.__mul__ first.)
>
> Have you tried defining sparse.__rmul__? dense.__mul__ should raise
> an exception when it does not know about the rhs operant and then
> Python calls <rhs operant>.__rmul__.

Yes, we've defined __rmul__, and this works fine for dense arrays, whose
__mul__ raises an exception.  The problem is that matrix.__mul__ calls
dot(), which doesn't raise an exception, but rather creates an oddball
object array:

matrix([[  (1, 0)       0.0
  (2, 1)        0.0
  (3, 0)        0.0,
          (1, 0)        0.0
  (2, 1)        0.0
  (3, 0)        0.0,
          (1, 0)        0.0
  (2, 1)        0.0
  (3, 0)        0.0]], dtype=object)


We could potentially modify the __mul__ function of numpy's matrix
objects to make a guess about whether an array constructed out of the
argument will somehow be sane or whether, like here, it should raise an
exception.  But this would be difficult to get right, since the sparse
matrix formats are quite varied (some supporting the map/sequence
protocols, some not, etc.).  But being able to test isinstance(arg,
spmatrix) would make this easy.

-- Ed