>>>>> "Jose" == Jose Quesada <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>>>> on Fri, 26 Jan 2007 05:24:12 +0100 writes:
Jose> Dear R users, Jose> I need to normalize a bunch of row vectors. At a certain point I need to divide a matrix by a vector of norms. I find that the behavior of Matrix objects differs from normal matrix objects. I believe you are showing evidence for that; though I know it's still true, and will be less true for the next release of the Matrix package. Jose> Example the following code examples differ only in Jose> xnormed changing from normal to Matrix object: Jose> x = matrix(1:12,3,4) Jose> x = as(x, "CsparseMatrix") or directly x <- Matrix(1:12, 3,4, sparse = TRUE) I hope that you are aware of the fact that it's not efficient at all to store a dense matrix (it has *no* 0 entry) as a sparse one.. Jose> xnorms = sqrt(colSums(x^2)) Jose> (xnormed = t(x) * (1/xnorms)) Jose> This produces a "warning: coercing sparse to dense matrix for arithmetic Jose> in: t(x) * 1/xnorms." but gets the result (a 4 x 3 matrix) Jose> I want to stay in sparse format anyway Jose> (if it helps!) what should it help for? Are you talking about a real application with a proper sparse matrix as opposed to the toy example here? In that case I agree, and as a matter of fact, the source code of the Matrix package leading to the above warning is the following } else { ## FIXME: maybe far from optimal: warning("coercing sparse to dense matrix for arithmetic") callGeneric(as(e1, "dgeMatrix"), e2) } and your posting is indeed an incentive for the Matrix developers to improve that part ... ;-) Jose> so I tried Jose> x = matrix(1:12,3,4) Jose> x = as(x, "CsparseMatrix") Jose> xnorms = sqrt(colSums(x^2)) Jose> xnorms = as(xnorms, "CsparseMatrix") Jose> (xnormed = t(x) * (1/xnorms)) Jose> But now, instead of a warning I get Jose> "Error: Matrices must have same dimensions in t(x) * (1/xnorms)" yes. And the same happens with traditional matrices -- and well so: For arithmetic with matrices (traditional or "Matrices"), A o B (o in {"+", "*", "^", ....}) ----- does require that matrices A and B are ``conformable'', i.e., have exact same dimensions. Only when one of A or B is *not* a matrix, then the usual S-language recycling rules are applied, and that's what you were using in your first example (<Matrix> * <numeric>) above. Jose> If I transpose the norms, the error dissapears, but the result is 1 x 4 (not 3 x 4 as before). That would be a bug of *not* giving an error... but I can't see it. Can you please give an exact example -- as you well gave otherwise; and BTW, do you use a sensible sparse matrix such as (x <- Matrix(c(0,0,1,0), 3,4)) Jose> I suspect I'm facing the drop=T as before... why?? Jose> Also, it seems that in normal matrix objects %*% Jose> behaves the same as *, not at all!! If that was the case, the inventors of the S language would never have introduced '%*%' ! Jose> but in Matrix objects that is not the case. Jose> What am I missing? I guess several things, see above, notably how basic matrix+vector - arithmetic is defined to in the S language. Regards, Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.