Efficient way to sample a large array many times with NumPy?

Question

If you don't care about the details of what I'm trying to implement, just skip past the lower horizontal line

I am trying to do a bootstrap error estimation on some statistic with NumPy. I have an array x, and wish to compute the error on the statistic f(x) for which usual gaussian assumptions in error analysis do not hold. x is very large.

To do this, I resample x using numpy.random.choice(), where the size of my resample is the size of the original array, with replacement:

resample = np.random.choice(x, size=len(x), replace=True)

This gives me a new realization of x. This operation must now be repeated ~1,000 times to give an accurate error estimate. If I generate 1,000 resamples of this nature;

resamples = [np.random.choice(x, size=len(x), replace=True) for i in range(1000)]

and then compute the statistic f(x) on each realization;

results = [f(arr) for arr in resamples]

then I have inferred the error of f(x) to be something like

np.std(results)

the idea being that even though f(x) itself cannot be described using gaussian error analysis, a distribution of f(x) measures subject to random error can be.

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Okay, so that's a bootstrap. Now, my problem is that the line

resamples = [np.random.choice(x, size=len(x), replace=True) for i in range(1000)]

is very slow for large arrays. Is there a smarter way to do this without a list comprehension? The second list comprehension

results = [f(arr) for arr in resamples]

can be pretty slow too, depending on the details of the function f(x).

Answer 1

Since we are allowing repetitions, we could generate all the indices in one go with np.random.randint and then simply index to get resamples equivalent, like so -

num_samples = 1000
idx = np.random.randint(0,len(x),size=(num_samples,len(x)))
resamples_arr = x[idx]

One more approach would be to generate random number from uniform distribution with numpy.random.rand and scale to length of array, like so -

resamples_arr = x[(np.random.rand(num_samples,len(x))*len(x)).astype(int)]

Runtime test with x of 5000 elems -

In [221]: x = np.random.randint(0,10000,(5000))

# Original soln
In [222]: %timeit [np.random.choice(x, size=len(x), replace=True) for i in range(1000)]
10 loops, best of 3: 84 ms per loop

# Proposed soln-1
In [223]: %timeit x[np.random.randint(0,len(x),size=(1000,len(x)))]
10 loops, best of 3: 76.2 ms per loop

# Proposed soln-2
In [224]: %timeit x[(np.random.rand(1000,len(x))*len(x)).astype(int)]
10 loops, best of 3: 59.7 ms per loop

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For very large x

With a very large array x of 600,000 elements, you might not want to create all those indices for 1000 samples. In that case, per sample solution would have their timings something like this -

In [234]: x = np.random.randint(0,10000,(600000))

# Original soln
In [235]: %timeit np.random.choice(x, size=len(x), replace=True)
100 loops, best of 3: 13 ms per loop

# Proposed soln-1
In [238]: %timeit x[np.random.randint(0,len(x),len(x))]
100 loops, best of 3: 12.5 ms per loop

# Proposed soln-2
In [239]: %timeit x[(np.random.rand(len(x))*len(x)).astype(int)]
100 loops, best of 3: 9.81 ms per loop