Given a 2D numpy array, I want to construct an array out of the column indices of the maximum value of each row. So far, arr.argmax(1) works well. However, for my specific case, for some rows, 2 or more columns may contain the maximum value. In that case, I want to select a column index randomly (not the first index as it is the case with .argmax(1)).
For example, for the following arr:
arr = np.array([
[0, 1, 0],
[1, 1, 0],
[2, 1, 3],
[3, 2, 2]
])
there can be two possible outcomes: array([1, 0, 2, 0]) and array([1, 1, 2, 0]) each chosen with 1/2 probability.
I have code that returns the expected output using a list comprehension:
idx = np.arange(arr.shape[1])
ans = [np.random.choice(idx[ix]) for ix in arr == arr.max(1, keepdims=True)]
but I'm looking for an optimized numpy solution. In other words, how do I replace the list comprehension with numpy methods to make the code feasible for bigger arrays?
After some advice I got offline, it turns out that randomization of maximum values are possible when we multiply the boolean array that flags row-wise maximum values by a random array of the same shape. Then what remains is a simple argmax(1) call.
# boolean array that flags maximum values of each row
mxs = arr == arr.max(1, keepdims=True)
# random array where non-maximum values are zero and maximum values are random values
random_arr = np.random.rand(*arr.shape) * mxs
# row-wise maximum of the auxiliary array
ans = random_arr.argmax(1)
A timeit test shows that for data of shape (507_563, 12), this code runs in ~172 ms on my machine while the loop in the question runs for 11 sec, so this is about 63x faster.