Question

I’m trying to port a program which uses a hand-rolled interpolator (developed by a mathematician colleage) over to use the interpolators provided by scipy. I’d like to use or wrap the scipy interpolator so that it has as close as possible behavior to the old interpolator.

A key difference between the two functions is that in our original interpolator – if the input value is above or below the input range, our original interpolator will extrapolate the result. If you try this with the scipy interpolator it raises a ValueError. Consider this program as an example:

import numpy as np
from scipy import interpolate

x = np.arange(0,10)
y = np.exp(-x/3.0)
f = interpolate.interp1d(x, y)

print f(9)
print f(11) # Causes ValueError, because it's greater than max(x)

Is there a sensible way to make it so that instead of crashing, the final line will simply do a linear extrapolate, continuing the gradients defined by the first and last two points to infinity.

Note, that in the real software I’m not actually using the exp function – that’s here for illustration only!

Answer 1

1. Constant extrapolation

You can use interp function from scipy, it extrapolates left and right values as constant beyond the range:

>>> from scipy import interp, arange, exp
>>> x = arange(0,10)
>>> y = exp(-x/3.0)
>>> interp([9,10], x, y)
array([ 0.04978707,  0.04978707])

2. Linear (or other custom) extrapolation

You can write a wrapper around an interpolation function which takes care of linear extrapolation. For example:

from scipy.interpolate import interp1d
from scipy import arange, array, exp

def extrap1d(interpolator):
    xs = interpolator.x
    ys = interpolator.y

    def pointwise(x):
        if x < xs[0]:
            return ys[0]+(x-xs[0])*(ys[1]-ys[0])/(xs[1]-xs[0])
        elif x > xs[-1]:
            return ys[-1]+(x-xs[-1])*(ys[-1]-ys[-2])/(xs[-1]-xs[-2])
        else:
            return interpolator(x)

    def ufunclike(xs):
        return array(list(map(pointwise, array(xs))))

    return ufunclike

extrap1d takes an interpolation function and returns a function which can also extrapolate. And you can use it like this:

x = arange(0,10)
y = exp(-x/3.0)
f_i = interp1d(x, y)
f_x = extrap1d(f_i)

print f_x([9,10])

Output:

[ 0.04978707  0.03009069]