Thanks. The instances of XX[i, :] that appear in my post here are just 
pseudo-code. In the actual implementation only column-wise slices are used.

On Tuesday, November 11, 2014 3:49:00 AM UTC-5, Mauro wrote:
>
> I didn't look at your code but it sounds like you are doing row wise 
> operations.  However, the sparse matrices in Julia (and in Matlab too, I 
> think) are much faster at column-wise access: 
>
> XX[:,i] is fast 
> XX[i,:] is slow 
>
> If you have to do both, then you can consider doing column-wise first 
> then transpose and do columns again. 
>
> On Mon, 2014-11-10 at 22:03, Joshua Tokle <[email protected] <javascript:>> 
> wrote: 
> > Hello! I'm trying to replace an existing matlab code with julia and I'm 
> > having trouble matching the performance of the original code. The matlab 
> > code is here: 
> >     https://github.com/jotok/InventorDisambiguator/blob/julia/Disambig.m 
> > 
> > The program clusters inventors from a database of patent applications. 
> The 
> > input data is a sparse boolean matrix (named XX in the script), where 
> each 
> > row defines an inventor and each column defines a feature. For example, 
> the 
> > jth column might correspond to a feature "first name is John". If there 
> is 
> > a 1 in the XX[i, j], this means that inventor i's first name is John. 
> Given 
> > an inventor i, we find similar inventors by identifying rows in the 
> matrix 
> > that agree with XX[i, :] on a given column and then applying 
> element-wise 
> > boolean operations to the rows. In the code, for a given value of 
> `index`, 
> > C_lastname holds the unique column in XX corresponding to a "last name" 
> > feature such that XX[index, :] equals 1. C_firstname holds the unique 
> > column in XX corresponding to a "first name" feature such that XX[index, 
> :] 
> > equals 1. And so on. The following code snippet finds all rows in the 
> > matrix that agree with XX[index, :] on full name and one of patent 
> assignee 
> > name, inventory city, or patent class: 
> > 
> >     lump_index_2 = step & ((C_assignee | C_city | C_class)) 
> > 
> > The `step` variable is an indicator that's used to prevent the same 
> > inventors from being considered multiple times. My attempt at a literal 
> > translation of this code to julia is here: 
> >     
> https://github.com/jotok/InventorDisambiguator/blob/julia/disambig.jl 
> > 
> > The matrix X is of type SparseMatrixCSC{Int64, Int64}. Boolean 
> operations 
> > aren't supported for sparse matrices in julia, so I fake it with integer 
> > arithmetic.  The line that corresponds to the matlab code above is 
> > 
> >     lump_index_2 = find(step .* (C_name .* (C_assignee + C_city + 
> C_class))) 
> > 
> > The reason I grouped it this way is that initially `step` will be a 
> > "sparse" vector of all 1's, and I thought it might help to do the truly 
> > sparse arithmetic first. 
> > 
> > I've been testing this code on a Windows 2008 Server. The test data 
> > contains 45,763 inventors and 274,578 possible features (in other words, 
> XX 
> > is an 45,763 x 274,58 sparse matrix). The matlab program consistently 
> takes 
> > about 70 seconds to run on this data. The julia version shows a lot of 
> > variation: it's taken as little as 60 seconds and as much as 10 minutes. 
> > However, most runs take around 3.5 to 4 minutes. I pasted one output 
> from 
> > the sampling profiler here [1]. If I'm reading this correctly, it looks 
> > like the program is spending most of its time performing element-wise 
> > multiplication of the indicator vectors I described above. 
> > 
> > I would be grateful for any suggestions that would bring the performance 
> of 
> > the julia program in line with the matlab version. I've heard that the 
> last 
> > time the matlab code was run on the full data set it took a couple days, 
> so 
> > a slow-down of 3-4x is a signficant burden. I did attempt to write a 
> more 
> > idiomatic julia version using Dicts and Sets, but it's slower than the 
> > version that uses sparse matrix operations: 
> >     
> https://github.com/jotok/InventorDisambiguator/blob/julia/disambig2.jl 
> > 
> > Thank you! 
> > Josh 
> > 
> > 
> > [1] https://gist.github.com/jotok/6b469a1dc0ff9529caf5 
>
>

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