[Numpy-discussion] Bringing order to higher dimensional operations

josef.pktd at gmail.com josef.pktd at gmail.com
Sat Jul 20 01:44:18 EDT 2013


On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 12:10 PM, Sebastian Berg
<sebastian at sipsolutions.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 2013-07-19 at 16:14 +0100, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 2:23 PM, Sebastian Berg
>> <sebastian at sipsolutions.net> wrote:
>> > On Thu, 2013-07-18 at 13:52 +0100, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
>> >> Hi all,
>> >>
> <snip>
>>
>> What I mean is: Suppose we wrote a gufunc for 'sum', where the
>> intrinsic operation took a vector and returned a scalar. (E.g. we want
>> to implement one of the specialized algorithms for vector summation,
>> like Kahan summation, which can be more accurate than applying scalar
>> addition repeatedly.)
>>
>> Then we'd have:
>>
>> np.sum(ones((2, 3))).shape == ()
>> np.add.reduce(ones((2, 3))).shape == (3,)
>> gufunc_sum(ones((2, 3))).shape == (2,)
>>
>
> Ah, indeed! So we have a different default behaviour for ufunc.reduce
> and all other reduce-like functions, didn't realize that. Changing that
> would be one huge thing...

I thought reduce, accumulate and reduceat (and map in python) are
functions on iterators, and numpy still uses axis=0 to iterate over.

related: is there any advantage to np.add.reduce?
I find it more difficult to read than sum() and still see it used sometimes.

(dot with more than 3 dimension is weird, and I never found a use for it.)

Josef


> As to implementing such thing as a Kahan summation, it is true, I also
> can't see how it fits into the machinery. Maybe it shouldn't even be a
> gufunc, but we rather need a way to specialize the reduction, or tag on
> more information into the ufunc itself?
>
> - Sebastian
>
>> These are three names for exactly the same underlying function... but
>> they all have different defaults for how they vectorize.
>>
>> -n
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>
>
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