[Numpy-discussion] Sparse matrix hooks

[Pearu Peterson]

On Mon, 27 Feb 2006, Ed Schofield wrote:

> 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.

Sure, isinstance(arg,spmatrix) would work but it is not a general 
solution for performing binary operations with matrices and such user 
defined objects that numpy is not aware of. But these objects may be aware 
of numpy matrices or arrays. Sparse matrix is one example. Other example 
is defining a symbolic matrix. Etc.
So, IMHO matrix.__mul__ (or dot) should be fixed instead.

Pearu