Best practice when working with sparse matrices

Question

My question is twofold:

In the below, A = full(S) where S is a sparse matrix.

What's the "correct" way to access an element in a sparse matrix?

That is, what would the sparse equivalent to var = A(row, col) be?

My view on this topic: You wouldn't do anything different. var = S(row, col) is as efficient as it gets.

What's the "correct" way to add elements to a sparse matrix?

That is, what would the sparse equivalent of A(row, col) = var be? (Assuming A(row, col) == 0 to begin with)

It is known that simply doing A(row, col) = var is slow for large sparse matrices. From the documentation:

If you wanted to change a value in this matrix, you might be tempted to use the same indexing:

B(3,1) = 42; % This code does work, however, it is slow.

My view on this topic: When working with sparse matrices, you often start with the vectors and use them to create the matrix this way: S = sparse(i,j,s,m,n). Of course, you could also have created it like this: S = sparse(A) or sprand(m,n,density) or something similar.

If you start of the first way, you would simply do:

i = [i; new_i];
j = [j; new_j];
s = [s; new_s];
S = sparse(i,j,s,m,n); 

If you started out not having the vectors, you would do the same thing, but use find first:

[i, j, s] = find(S);
i = [i; new_i];
j = [j; new_j];
s = [s; new_s];
S = sparse(i,j,s,m,n); 

Now you would of course have the vectors, and can reuse them if you're doing this operation several times. It would however be better to add all new elements at once, and not do the above in a loop, because growing vectors are slow. In this case, new_i, new_j and new_s will be vectors corresponding to the new elements.

Answer 1

MATLAB stores sparse matrices in compressed column format. This means that when you perform an operations like A(2,2) (to get the element in at row 2, column 2) MATLAB first access the second column and then finds the element in row 2 (row indices in each column are stored in ascending order). You can think of it as:

 A2 = A(:,2);
 A2(2)

If you are only accessing a single element of sparse matrix doing var = S(r,c) is fine. But if you are looping over the elements of a sparse matrix, you probably want to access one column at a time, and then loop over the nonzero row indices via [i,~,x]=find(S(:,c)). Or use something like spfun.

You should avoid constructing a dense matrix A and then doing S = sparse(A), as this operations just squeezes out zeros. Instead, as you note, it's much more efficient to build a sparse matrix from scratch using triplet-form and a call to sparse(i,j,x,m,n). MATLAB has a nice page which describes how to efficiently construct sparse matrices.

The original paper describing the implementation of sparse matrices in MATLAB is quite a good read. It provides some more info on how the sparse matrix algorithms were originally implemented.