Element wise exp() of scipy sparse matrix

Question

I have a very big sparse csc_matrix x. I want to do elementwise exp() on it. Basically what I want is to get the same result as I would have got with numpy.exp(x.toarray()). But I can't do that(my memory won't allow me to convert the sparse matrix into an array). Is there any way out? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If you don't have the memory to hold x.toarray(), you don't have the memory to hold the output you're asking for. The output won't be sparse; in fact, unless your input has negative infinities in it, the output probably won't have a single 0.

It'd probably be better to compute exp(x)-1, which is as simple as

x.expm1()