Fast Constrained Least Squares - python

I have to solve many independent constrained linear least squares problems (with both bounds and constrains). So I do it multiple times in loops. For each problem I am looking for x that is min||Cx-d|| and x is bounded (in 0,1) and all x elements must sum to 1.
I am seeking a way of doing it fast, because although each optimization doesn't require a lot of time, I need to include it in a large loop.
For example my Matlab implementation seems like this:
img = imread('test.tif');
C = randi(255,6,4);
x=zeros(size(C,2),1);
tp = zeros(size(C,2),1);
Aeq = ones(1,size(C,2));
beq = 1;
options = optimset('LargeScale','off','Display','off');
A = (-1).*eye(size(C,2));
b = zeros(1,size(C,2));
result = zeros(size(img,1),size(img,2),size(C,2));
for i=1:size(img,1)
for j=1:size(img,2)
for k=1:size(img,3)
tp(k) = img(i,j,k);
end
x = lsqlin(C,tp,A,b,Aeq,beq,[],[],[],options);
for l=1:size(C,2)
result(i,j,l)=x(l);
end
end
end
and for a 500x500 loop it takes about 5 minutes. But my loops are much bigger than this. Any idea is welcome, but I would prefer a Matlab, Python or R solution.

As mentioned in the comments: The used commands are highly optimized, and switching languages is not going to make a world of difference.
First of all go back to what you are trying to achieve, perhaps to achieve that you don't need to solve this many hard problems.
If you come to the conclusion that you do want to do this exact calculation, consider changing the settings, and play around with the algorithm.
From doc lsqlin it appears the two main parameters that determine the speed are:
Number of iterations
Accepted tolerance
If all these things don't help enough, consider some tricks like:
Only solving problems that are sufficiently different
Solving with easier constraints, and rounding the result

Related

Optimization of Unique, non-reversible permutations in Python

I'm currently trying to solve the 'dance recital' kattis challenge in Python 3. See here
After taking input on how many performances there are in the dance recital, you must arrange performances in such a way that sequential performances by a dancer are minimized.
I've seen this challenge completed in C++, but my code kept running out of time and I wanted to optimize it.
Question: As of right now, I generate all possible permutations of performances and run comparisons off of that. A faster way to would be to not generate all permutations, as some of them are simply reversed and would result in the exact same output.
import itertools
print(list(itertools.permutations(range(2)))) --> [(0,1),(1,0)] #They're the same, backwards and forwards
print(magic_algorithm(range(2))) --> [(0,1)] #This is what I want
How might I generate such a list of permutations?
I've tried:
-Generating all permutation, running over them again to reversed() duplicates and saving them. This takes too long and the result cannot be hard coded into the solution as the file becomes too big.
-Only generating permutations up to the half-way mark, then stopping, assuming that after that, no unique permutations are generated (not true, as I found out)
-I've checked out questions here, but no one seems to have the same question as me, ditto on the web
Here's my current code:
from itertools import permutations
number_of_routines = int(input()) #first line is number of routines
dance_routine_list = [0]*10
permutation_list = list(permutations(range(number_of_routines))) #generate permutations
for q in range(number_of_routines):
s = input()
for c in s:
v = ord(c) - 65
dance_routine_list[q] |= (1 << v) #each routine ex.'ABC' is A-Z where each char represents a performer in the routine
def calculate():
least_changes_possible = 1e9 #this will become smaller, as optimizations are found
for j in permutation_list:
tmp = 0
for i in range(1,number_of_routines):
tmp += (bin(dance_routine_list[j[i]] & dance_routine_list[j[i - 1]]).count('1')) #each 1 represents a performer who must complete sequential routines
least_changes_possible = min(least_changes_possible, tmp)
return least_changes_possible
print(calculate())
Edit: Took a shower and decided adding a 2-element-comparison look-up table would speed it up, as many of the operations are repeated. Still doesn't fix iterating over the whole permutations, but it should help.
Edit: Found another thread that answered this pretty well. How to generate permutations of a list without "reverse duplicates" in Python using generators
Thank you all!
There are at most 10 possible dance routines, so at most 3.6M permutations, and even bad algorithms like generate 'em all and test will be done very quickly.
If you wanted a fast solution for up to 24 or so routines, then I would do it like this...
Given the the R dance routines, at any point in the recital, in order to decide which routine you can perform next, you need to know:
Which routines you've already performed, because there you can't do those ones next. There are 2R possible sets of already-performed routines; and
Which routine was performed last, because that helps determine the cost of the next one. There are at most R-1 possible values for that.
So there are at less than (R-2)*2R possible recital states...
Imagine a directed graph that connects each possible state to all the possible following states, by an edge for the routine that you would perform to get to that state. Label each edge with the cost of performing that routine.
For example, if you've performed routines 5 and 6, with 5 last, then you would be in state (5,6):5, and there would be an edge to (3,5,6):3 that you could get to after performing routine 3.
Starting at the initial "nothing performed yet" state ():-, use Dijkstra's algorithm to find the least cost path to a state with all routines performed.
Total complexity is O(R2*2R) or so, depending exactly how you implement it.
For R=10, R2*2R is ~100 000, which won't take very long at all. For R=24 it's about 9 billion, which is going to take under half a minute in pretty good C++.

Python: loop optimization

I am quite new to Python but I've started using it for some data analysis and now I love it. Before, I used C, which I find just terrible for file I/O.
I am working on a script which computes the radial distribution function between a set of N=10000 (ten thousands) points in a 3D box with periodic boundary conditions (PBC). Basically, I have a file of 10000 lines made like this:
0.037827 0.127853 -0.481895
12.056849 -12.100216 1.607448
10.594823 1.937731 -9.527205
-5.333775 -2.345856 -9.217283
-5.772468 -10.625633 13.097802
-5.290887 12.135528 -0.143371
0.250986 7.155687 2.813220
which represents the coordinates of the N points. What I have to do is to compute the distance between every couple of points (I hence have to consider all the 49995000 combinations of 2 elements) and then do some operation on it.
Of course the most taxing part of the program is the loop over the 49995000 combinations.
My current function looks like this:
g=[0 for i in range(Nbins)]
for i in range(Nparticles):
for j in range(i+1,Nparticles):
#compute distance and apply PBC
dx=coors[i][0]-coors[j][0]
if(dx>halfSide):
dx-=boxSide
elif(dx<-halfSide):
dx+=boxSide
dy=coors[i][1]-coors[j][1]
if(dy>halfSide):
dy-=boxSide
elif(dy<-halfSide):
dy+=boxSide
dz=coors[i][2]-coors[j][2]
if(dz>halfSide):
dz-=boxSide
elif(dz<-halfSide):
dz+=boxSide
d2=dx**2+dy**2+dz**2
if(d2<(cutoff*boxSide)**2):
g[int(sqrt(d2)/dr)]+=2
Notice: coors is a nested array, created using loadtxt() on the data file.
I basically recycled a function that I used in another program, written in C.
I am not using itertool.combinations() because I have noticed that the program runs slightly slower if I use it for some reason (one iteration is around 111 s while it runs in around 106 with this implementation).
This function takes around 106 s to run, which is terrible considering that I have to analyze some 500 configuration files.
Now, my question is: is there general a way to make this kind of loops run faster using Python? I guess that the corresponding C code would be faster, but I would like to stick to Python because it is so much easier to use.
I would like to stress that even though I'm certainly looking for a particular solution to my problem, I would like to know how to iterate more efficiently when using Python in general.
PS Please try to explain the code in your answers as much as possible (if you write any) because I'm a newbie in Python.
Update
First, I want to say that I know that, since there is a cutoff, I could write a more efficient algorithm if I divide the box in smaller boxes and only compute the distances in neighboring boxes, but for now I would only like to speed up this particular algorithm.
I also want to say that using Cython (I followed this tutorial) I managed to speed up everything a little bit, as expected (77 s, where before it took 106).
If memory is not an issue (and it probably isn't given that the actual amount of data won't be different from what you are doing now), you can use numpy to do the math for you and put everything into an NxN array (around 800MB at 8 bytes/float).
Given the operations your code is trying to do, I do not think you need any loops outside numpy:
g = numpy.zeros((Nbins,))
coors = numpy.array(coors)
#compute distance and apply PBC
dx = numpy.subtract.outer(coors[:, 0], coors[:, 0])
dx[dx < -halfSide] += boxSide
dx[dx > halfSide)] -= boxSide
dy = numpy.subtract.outer(coors[:, 1], coors[:, 1])
dy[dy < -halfSide] += boxSide
dy[dy > halfSide] -= boxSide
dz = numpy.subtract.outer(coors[:, 2], coors[:, 2])
dz[dz < -halfSide] += boxSide
dz[dz > halfSide] -= boxSide
d2=dx**2 + dy**2 + dz**2
# Avoid counting diagonal elements: inf would do as well as nan
numpy.fill_diagonal(d2, numpy.nan)
# This is the same length as the number of times the
# if-statement in the loops would have triggered
cond = numpy.sqrt(d2[d2 < (cutoff*boxSide)**2]) / dr
# See http://stackoverflow.com/a/24100418/2988730
np.add.at(g, cond.astype(numpy.int_), 2)
The point is to always stay away from looping in Python when dealing with large amounts of data. Python loops are inefficient. They perform lots of book-keeping operations that slow down the math code.
Libraries such as numpy and dynd provide operations that run the loops you want "under the hood", usually bypassing the bookkeeping with a C implementation. The advantage is that you can do the Python-level book-keeping once for each enormous array and then get on with processing the raw numbers instead of dealing with Python wrapper objects (numbers are full blown-objects in Python, there are no primitive types).
In this particular example, I have recast your code to use a sequence of array-level operations that do the same thing that your original code did. This requires restructuring how you think about the steps a little, but should save a lot on runtime.
You've got an interesting problem there. There are some common guidelines for high performance Python; these are for Python2 but should carry for the most part to Python3.
Profile your code. Using %timeit and %%timeit on jupyter/ipython is quick and fast for interactive sessions, but cProfile and line_profiler are valuable for finding bottlenecks.
This a link to a short essay that covers the basics from the Python documentation that I found helpful: https://www.python.org/doc/essays/list2str
Numpy is a great package for vectorized operations. Note that numpy vectors are generally slower to work with than small-medium size lists but the memory savings are huge. Speed gain is substantial over lists when doing multi-dimensional arrays. Also if you start observing cache misses and page-faults with pure Python, then the numpy benefit will be even greater.
I have been using Cython recently with a fair amount of success, where numpy/scipy don't quite cut it with the builtin functions.
Check out scipy which has a huge library of functions for scientific computing. There's a lot to explore; eg., the scipy.spatial.pdist function computes fast nC2 pairwise distances. In the testrun below, 10k items pairwise distances completed in 375ms. 100k items will probably break my machine though without refactoring.
import numpy as np
from scipy.spatial.distance import pdist
xyz_list = np.random.rand(10000, 3)
xyz_list
Out[2]:
array([[ 0.95763306, 0.47458207, 0.24051024],
[ 0.48429121, 0.12201472, 0.80701931],
[ 0.26035835, 0.76394588, 0.7832222 ],
...,
[ 0.07835084, 0.8775841 , 0.20906537],
[ 0.73248369, 0.60908474, 0.57163023],
[ 0.68945879, 0.19393467, 0.23771904]])
In [10]: %timeit xyz_pairwise = pdist(xyz_list)
1 loop, best of 3: 375 ms per loop
In [12]: xyz_pairwise = pdist(xyz_list)
In [13]: len(xyz_pairwise)
Out[13]: 49995000
Happy exploring!

How to Optimize the Python Code

All,
I am going to compute some feature values using the following python codes. But, because the input sizes are too big, it is very time-consuming. Please help me to optimize the codes.
leaving_volume=len([x for x in pickup_ids if x not in dropoff_ids])
arriving_volume=len([x for x in dropoff_ids if x not in pickup_ids])
transition_volume=len([x for x in dropoff_ids if x in pickup_ids])
union_ids=list(set(pickup_ids + dropoff_ids))
busstop_ids=[x for x in union_ids if self.geoitems[x].fare>0]
busstop_density=np.sum([Util.Geodist(self.geoitems[x].orilat, self.geoitems[x].orilng, self.geoitems[x].destlat, self.geoitems[x].destlng)/(1000*self.geoitems[x].fare) for x in busstop_ids])/len(busstop_ids) if len(busstop_ids) > 0 else 0
busstop_ids=[x for x in union_ids if self.geoitems[x].balance>0]
smartcard_balance=np.sum([self.geoitems[x].balance for x in busstop_ids])/len(busstop_ids) if len(busstop_ids) > 0 else 0
Hi, All,
Here is my revised version. I run this code on my GPS traces data. It is faster.
intersect_ids=set(pickup_ids).intersection( set(dropoff_ids) )
union_ids=list(set(pickup_ids + dropoff_ids))
leaving_ids=set(pickup_ids)-intersect_ids
leaving_volume=len(leaving_ids)
arriving_ids=set(dropoff_ids)-intersect_ids
arriving_volume=len(arriving_ids)
transition_volume=len(intersect_ids)
busstop_density=np.mean([Util.Geodist(self.geoitems[x].orilat, self.geoitems[x].orilng, self.geoitems[x].destlat, self.geoitems[x].destlng)/(1000*self.geoitems[x].fare) for x in union_ids if self.geoitems[x].fare>0])
if not busstop_density > 0:
busstop_density = 0
smartcard_balance=np.mean([self.geoitems[x].balance for x in union_ids if self.geoitems[x].balance>0])
if not smartcard_balance > 0:
smartcard_balance = 0
Many thanks for the help.
Just a few things I noticed, as some Python efficiency trivia:
if x not in dropoff_ids
Checking for membership using the in operator is more efficient on a set than a list. But iterating with for through a list is probably more efficient than on a set. So if you want your first two lines to be as efficient as possible you should have both types of data structure around beforehand.
list(set(pickup_ids + dropoff_ids))
It's more efficient to create your sets before you combine data, rather than creating a long list and constructing a set from it. Luckily you probably already have the set versions around now (see the first comment)!
Above all you need to ask yourself the question:
Is the time I save by constructing extra data structures worth the time it takes to construct them?
Next one:
np.sum([...])
I've been trained by Python to think of constructing a list and then applying a function that theoretically only requires a generator as a code smell. I'm not sure if this applies in numpy, since from what I remember it's not completely straightforward to pull data from a generator and put it in a numpy structure.
It looks like this is just a small fragment of your code. If you're really concerned about efficiency I'd recommend making use of numpy arrays rather than lists, and trying to stick within numpy's built-in data structures and function as much as possible. They are likely more highly optimized for raw data crunching in C than the built-in Python functions.
If you're really, really concerned about efficiency then you should probably be doing this data analysis straight-up in C. Especially if you don't have much more code than what you've presented here it might be pretty easy to translate over.
I can only support what machine yerning wrote in his this post. If you are thinking of switching to numpy so if your variables pickup_ids and dropoff_ids were numpy arrays (which maybe they already are else do:
dropoff_ids = np.array( dropoff_ids, dtype='i' )
pickup_ids = np.array( pickup_ids, dtype='i' )
then you can make use of the functions np.in1d() which will give you a True/False array which you can just sum over to get the total number of True entries.
leaving_volume = (-np.in1d( pickup_ids, dropoff_ids )).sum()
transition_volume= np.in1d( dropoff_ids, pickup_ids).sum()
arriving_volume = (-np.in1d( dropoff_ids, pickup_ids)).sum()
somehow I have the feeling that transition_volume = len(pickup_ids) - arriving_volume but I'm not 100% sure right now.
Another function that could be useful to you is np.unique() if you want to get rid of duplicate entries which in a way will turn your array into a set.

Python loop transfer in other programming language

Again I have a question concerning large loops.
Suppose I have a function
limits
def limits(a,b):
*evaluate integral with upper and lower limits a and b*
return float result
A and B are simple np.arrays that store my values a and b. Now I want to calculate the integral 300'000^2/2 times because A and B are of the length of 300'000 each and the integral is symmetrical.
In Python I tried several ways like itertools.combinations_with_replacement to create the combinations of A and B and then put them into the integral but that takes huge amount of time and the memory is totally overloaded.
Is there any way, for example transferring the loop in another language, to speed this up?
I would like to run the loop
for i in range(len(A)):
for j in range(len(B)):
np.histogram(limits(A[i],B[j]))
I think histrogramming the return of limits is desirable in order not to store additional arrays that grow squarely.
From what I read python is not really the best choice for this iterative ansatzes.
So would it be reasonable to evaluate this loop in another language within Python, if yes, How to do it. I know there are ways to transfer code, but I have never done it so far.
Thanks for your help.
If you're worried about memory footprint, all you need to do is bin the results as you go in the for loop.
num_bins = 100
bin_upper_limits = np.linspace(-456, 456, num=num_bins-1)
# (last bin has no upper limit, it goes from 456 to infinity)
bin_count = np.zeros(num_bins)
for a in A:
for b in B:
if b<a:
# you said the integral is symmetric, so we can skip these, right?
continue
new_result = limits(a,b)
which_bin = np.digitize([new_result], bin_upper_limits)
bin_count[which_bin] += 1
So nothing large is saved in memory.
As for speed, I imagine that the overwhelming majority of time is spent evaluating limits(a,b). The looping and binning is plenty fast in this case, even in python. To convince yourself of this, try replacing the line new_result = limits(a,b) with new_result = 234. You'll find that the loop runs very fast. (A few minutes on my computer, much much less than the 4 hour figure you quote.) Python does not loop very fast compared to C, but it doesn't matter in this case.
Whatever you do to speed up the limits() call (including implementing it in another language) will speed up the program.
If you change the algorithm, there is vast room for improvement. Let's take an example of what it seems you're doing. Let's say A and B are 0,1,2,3. You're integrating a function over the ranges 0-->0, 0-->1, 1-->1, 1-->2, 0-->2, etc. etc. You're re-doing the same work over and over. If you have integrated 0-->1 and 1-->2, then you can add up those two results to get the integral 0-->2. You don't have to use a fancy integration algorithm, you just have to add two numbers you already know.
Therefore it seems to me that you can compute integrals in all the smallest ranges (0-->1, 1-->2, 2-->3), store the results in an array, and add subsets of the results to get the integral over whatever range you want. If you want this program to run in a few minutes instead of 4 hours, I suggest thinking through an alternative algorithm along those lines.
(Sorry if I'm misunderstanding the problem you're trying to solve.)

any faster alternative?

cost=0
for i in range(12):
cost=cost+math.pow(float(float(q[i])-float(w[i])),2)
cost=(math.sqrt(cost))
Any faster alternative to this? i am need to improve my entire code so trying to improve each statements performance.
thanking u
In addition to the general optimization remarks that are already made (and to which I subscribe), there is a more "optimized" way of doing what you want: you manipulate arrays of values and combine them mathematically. This is a job for the very useful and widely used NumPy package!
Here is how you would do it:
q_array = numpy.array(q, dtype=float)
w_array = numpy.array(w, dtype=float)
cost = math.sqrt(((q_array-w_array)**2).sum())
(If your arrays q and w already contain floats, you can remove the dtype=float.)
This is almost as fast as it can get, since NumPy's operations are optimized for arrays. It is also much more legible than a loop, because it is both simple and short.
Just a hint, but usually real performance improvements come when you evaluate the code at a function or even higher level.
During a good evaluation, you may find whole blocks that code be thrown away or rewritten to simplify the process.
Profilers are useful AFTER you've cleaned up crufty not-very-legible code. irrespective of whether it's to be run once or N zillion times, you should not write code like that.
Why are you doing float(q[i]) and float(w[i])? What type(s) is/are the elements of q and `w'?
If x and y are floats, then x - y will be a float too, so that's 3 apparently redundant occurrences of float() already.
Calling math.pow() instead of using the ** operator bears the overhead of lookups on 'math' and 'pow'.
Etc etc
See if the following code gives the same answers and reads better and is faster:
costsq = 0.0
for i in xrange(12):
costsq += (q[i] - w[i]) ** 2
cost = math.sqrt(costsq)
After you've tested that and understood why the changes were made, you can apply the lessons to other Python code. Then if you have a lot more array or matrix work to do, consider using numpy.
Assuming q and w contain numbers the conversions to float are not necessary, otherwise you should convert the lists to a usable representation earlier (and separately from your calculation)
Given that your function seems to only be doing the equivalent of this:
cost = sum( (qi-wi)**2 for qi,wi in zip(q[:12],w) ) ** 0.5
Perhaps this form would execute faster.

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