Question

For SciPy sparse matrix, one can use todense() or toarray() to transform to NumPy matrix or array. What are the functions to do the inverse?

I searched, but got no idea what keywords should be the right hit.

Answer 1

You can pass a numpy array or matrix as an argument when initializing a sparse matrix. For a CSR matrix, for example, you can do the following.

>>> import numpy as np
>>> from scipy import sparse
>>> A = np.array([[1,2,0],[0,0,3],[1,0,4]])
>>> B = np.matrix([[1,2,0],[0,0,3],[1,0,4]])

>>> A
array([[1, 2, 0],
       [0, 0, 3],
       [1, 0, 4]])

>>> sA = sparse.csr_matrix(A)   # Here's the initialization of the sparse matrix.
>>> sB = sparse.csr_matrix(B)

>>> sA
<3x3 sparse matrix of type '<type 'numpy.int32'>'
        with 5 stored elements in Compressed Sparse Row format>

>>> print sA
  (0, 0)        1
  (0, 1)        2
  (1, 2)        3
  (2, 0)        1
  (2, 2)        4