I have an np.array of observations z where z.shape is (100000, 60). I want to efficiently calculate the 100000x100000 correlation matrix and then write to disk the coordinates and values of just those elements > 0.95 (this is a very small fraction of the total).
My brute-force version of this looks like the following but is, not surprisingly, very slow:
for i1 in range(z.shape[0]):
for i2 in range(i1+1):
r = np.corrcoef(z[i1,:],z[i2,:])[0,1]
if r > 0.95:
file.write("%6d %6d %.3f\n" % (i1,i2,r))
I realize that the correlation matrix itself could be calculated much more efficiently in one operation using np.corrcoef(z), but the memory requirement is then huge. I'm also aware that one could break up the data set into blocks and calculate bite-size subportions of the correlation matrix at one time, but programming that and keeping track of the indices seems unnecessarily complicated.
Is there another way (e.g., using memmap or pytables) that is both simple to code and doesn't put excessive demands on physical memory?
After experimenting with the memmap solution proposed by others, I found that while it was faster than my original approach (which took about 4 days on my Macbook), it still took a very long time (at least a day) -- presumably due to inefficient element-by-element writes to the outputfile. That wasn't acceptable given my need to run the calculation numerous times.
In the end, the best solution (for me) was to sign in to Amazon Web Services EC2 portal, create a virtual machine instance (starting with an Anaconda Python-equipped image) with 120+ GiB of RAM, upload the input data file, and do the calculation (using the matrix multiplication method) entirely in core memory. It completed in about two minutes!
For reference, the code I used was basically this:
import numpy as np
import pickle
import h5py
# read nparray, dimensions (102000, 60)
infile = open(r'file.dat', 'rb')
x = pickle.load(infile)
infile.close()
# z-normalize the data -- first compute means and standard deviations
xave = np.average(x,axis=1)
xstd = np.std(x,axis=1)
# transpose for the sake of broadcasting (doesn't seem to work otherwise!)
ztrans = x.T - xave
ztrans /= xstd
# transpose back
z = ztrans.T
# compute correlation matrix - shape = (102000, 102000)
arr = np.matmul(z, z.T)
arr /= z.shape[0]
# output to HDF5 file
with h5py.File('correlation_matrix.h5', 'w') as hf:
hf.create_dataset("correlation", data=arr)