How to normalize a NumPy array to a unit vector?

Question

If you're using scikit-learn you can use sklearn.preprocessing.normalize:

import numpy as np
from sklearn.preprocessing import normalize

x = np.random.rand(1000)*10
norm1 = x / np.linalg.norm(x)
norm2 = normalize(x[:,np.newaxis], axis=0).ravel()
print np.all(norm1 == norm2)
# True

I agree that it would be nice if such a function were part of the included libraries. But it isn't, as far as I know. So here is a version for arbitrary axes that gives optimal performance.

import numpy as np

def normalized(a, axis=-1, order=2):
    l2 = np.atleast_1d(np.linalg.norm(a, order, axis))
    l2[l2==0] = 1
    return a / np.expand_dims(l2, axis)

A = np.random.randn(3,3,3)
print(normalized(A,0))
print(normalized(A,1))
print(normalized(A,2))

print(normalized(np.arange(3)[:,None]))
print(normalized(np.arange(3)))

This might also work for you

import numpy as np
normalized_v = v / np.sqrt(np.sum(v**2))

but fails when v has length 0.

In that case, introducing a small constant to prevent the zero division solves this.

You can specify ord to get the L1 norm. To avoid zero division I use eps, but that's maybe not great.

def normalize(v):
    norm=np.linalg.norm(v, ord=1)
    if norm==0:
        norm=np.finfo(v.dtype).eps
    return v/norm

If you have multidimensional data and want each axis normalized to its max or its sum:

def normalize(_d, to_sum=True, copy=True):
    # d is a (n x dimension) np array
    d = _d if not copy else np.copy(_d)
    d -= np.min(d, axis=0)
    d /= (np.sum(d, axis=0) if to_sum else np.ptp(d, axis=0))
    return d

Uses numpys peak to peak function.

a = np.random.random((5, 3))

b = normalize(a, copy=False)
b.sum(axis=0) # array([1., 1., 1.]), the rows sum to 1

c = normalize(a, to_sum=False, copy=False)
c.max(axis=0) # array([1., 1., 1.]), the max of each row is 1

You mentioned sci-kit learn, so I want to share another solution.

sci-kit learn MinMaxScaler

In sci-kit learn, there is a API called MinMaxScaler which can customize the the value range as you like.

It also deal with NaN issues for us.

NaNs are treated as missing values: disregarded in fit, and maintained in transform. ... see reference [1]

Code sample

The code is simple, just type

# Let's say X_train is your input dataframe
from sklearn.preprocessing import MinMaxScaler
# call MinMaxScaler object
min_max_scaler = MinMaxScaler()
# feed in a numpy array
X_train_norm = min_max_scaler.fit_transform(X_train.values)
# wrap it up if you need a dataframe
df = pd.DataFrame(X_train_norm)

Reference

• [1] sklearn.preprocessing.MinMaxScaler

There is also the function unit_vector() to normalize vectors in the popular transformations module by Christoph Gohlke:

import transformations as trafo
import numpy as np

data = np.array([[1.0, 1.0, 0.0],
                 [1.0, 1.0, 1.0],
                 [1.0, 2.0, 3.0]])

print(trafo.unit_vector(data, axis=1))