Question

Is there a smart and space-efficient symmetric matrix in numpy which automatically (and transparently) fills the position at [j][i] when [i][j] is written to?

import numpy
a = numpy.symmetric((3, 3))
a[0][1] = 1
a[1][0] == a[0][1]
# True
print(a)
# [[0 1 0], [1 0 0], [0 0 0]]

assert numpy.all(a == a.T) # for any symmetric matrix

An automatic Hermitian would also be nice, although I won’t need that at the time of writing.

Answer 1

If you can afford to symmetrize the matrix just before doing calculations, the following should be reasonably fast:

def symmetrize(a):
    """
    Return a symmetrized version of NumPy array a.

    Values 0 are replaced by the array value at the symmetric
    position (with respect to the diagonal), i.e. if a_ij = 0,
    then the returned array a' is such that a'_ij = a_ji.

    Diagonal values are left untouched.

    a -- square NumPy array, such that a_ij = 0 or a_ji = 0, 
    for i != j.
    """
    return a + a.T - numpy.diag(a.diagonal())

This works under reasonable assumptions (such as not doing both a[0, 1] = 42 and the contradictory a[1, 0] = 123 before running symmetrize).

If you really need a transparent symmetrization, you might consider subclassing numpy.ndarray and simply redefining __setitem__:

class SymNDArray(numpy.ndarray):
    """
    NumPy array subclass for symmetric matrices.

    A SymNDArray arr is such that doing arr[i,j] = value
    automatically does arr[j,i] = value, so that array
    updates remain symmetrical.
    """

    def __setitem__(self, (i, j), value):
        super(SymNDArray, self).__setitem__((i, j), value)                    
        super(SymNDArray, self).__setitem__((j, i), value)                    

def symarray(input_array):
    """
    Return a symmetrized version of the array-like input_array.

    The returned array has class SymNDArray. Further assignments to the array
    are thus automatically symmetrized.
    """
    return symmetrize(numpy.asarray(input_array)).view(SymNDArray)

# Example:
a = symarray(numpy.zeros((3, 3)))
a[0, 1] = 42
print a  # a[1, 0] == 42 too!

(or the equivalent with matrices instead of arrays, depending on your needs). This approach even handles more complicated assignments, like a[:, 1] = -1, which correctly sets a[1, :] elements.

Note that Python 3 removed the possibility of writing def …(…, (i, j),…), so the code has to be slightly adapted before running with Python 3: def __setitem__(self, indexes, value): (i, j) = indexes…