How to compute scipy sparse matrix determinant without turning it to dense?

Question

I am trying to figure out the fastest method to find the determinant of sparse symmetric and real matrices in python. using scipy sparse module but really surprised that there is no determinant function. I am aware I could use LU factorization to compute determinant but don't see a easy way to do it because the return of scipy.sparse.linalg.splu is an object and instantiating a dense L and U matrix is not worth it - I may as well do sp.linalg.det(A.todense()) where A is my scipy sparse matrix.

I am also a bit surprised why others have not faced the problem of efficient determinant computation within scipy. How would one use splu to compute determinant?

I looked into pySparse and scikits.sparse.chlmod. The latter is not practical right now for me - needs package installations and also not sure sure how fast the code is before I go into all the trouble. Any solutions? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Here are some references I provided as part of an answer here. I think they address the actual problem you are trying to solve:

• notes for an implementation in the Shogun library
• Erlend Aune, Daniel P. Simpson: Parameter estimation in high dimensional Gaussian distributions, particularly section 2.1 (arxiv:1105.5256)
• Ilse C.F. Ipsen, Dean J. Lee: Determinant Approximations (arxiv:1105.0437)
• Arnold Reusken: Approximation of the determinant of large sparse symmetric positive definite matrices (arxiv:hep-lat/0008007)

Quoting from the Shogun notes:

The usual technique for computing the log-determinant term in the likelihood expression relies on Cholesky factorization of the matrix, i.e. Σ=LLT, (L is the lower triangular Cholesky factor) and then using the diagonal entries of the factor to compute log(det(Σ))=2∑ni=1log(Lii). However, for sparse matrices, as covariance matrices usually are, the Cholesky factors often suffer from fill-in phenomena - they turn out to be not so sparse themselves. Therefore, for large dimensions this technique becomes infeasible because of a massive memory requirement for storing all these irrelevant non-diagonal co-efficients of the factor. While ordering techniques have been developed to permute the rows and columns beforehand in order to reduce fill-in, e.g. approximate minimum degree (AMD) reordering, these techniques depend largely on the sparsity pattern and therefore not guaranteed to give better result.

Recent research shows that using a number of techniques from complex analysis, numerical linear algebra and greedy graph coloring, we can, however, approximate the log-determinant up to an arbitrary precision [Aune et. al., 2012]. The main trick lies within the observation that we can write log(det(Σ)) as trace(log(Σ)), where log(Σ) is the matrix-logarithm.

Answer 2

The "standard" way to solve this problem is with a cholesky decomposition, but if you're not up to using any new compiled code, then you're out of luck. The best sparse cholesky implementation is Tim Davis's CHOLMOD, which is licensed under the LGPL and thus not available in scipy proper (scipy is BSD).