numpy.argmin for elements greater than a threshold

Question

I'm interested in getting the location of the minimum value in an 1-d NumPy array that meets a certain condition (in my case, a medium threshold). For example:

import numpy as np

limit = 3
a = np.array([1, 2, 4, 5, 2, 5, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10])

I'd like to effectively mask all numbers in a that are under the limit, such that the result of np.argmin would be 6. Is there a computationally cheap way to mask values that don't meet a condition and then apply np.argmin?

Answer 1

This can simply be accomplished using numpy's MaskedArray

import numpy as np

limit = 3
a = np.array([1, 2, 4, 5, 2, 5, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10])
b = np.ma.MaskedArray(a, a<limit)
np.ma.argmin(b)    # == 6

Answer 2

You could store the valid indices and use those for both selecting the valid elements from a and also indexing into with the argmin() among the selected elements to get the final index output. Thus, the implementation would look something like this -

valid_idx = np.where(a >= limit)[0]
out = valid_idx[a[valid_idx].argmin()]

Sample run -

In [32]: limit = 3
    ...: a = np.array([1, 2, 4, 5, 2, 5, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10])
    ...: 

In [33]: valid_idx = np.where(a >= limit)[0]

In [34]: valid_idx[a[valid_idx].argmin()]
Out[34]: 6

Runtime test -

For performance benchmarking, in this section I am comparing the other solution based on masked array against a regular array based solution as proposed earlier in this post for various datasizes.

def masked_argmin(a,limit): # Defining func for regular array based soln
    valid_idx = np.where(a >= limit)[0]
    return valid_idx[a[valid_idx].argmin()]

In [52]: # Inputs
    ...: a = np.random.randint(0,1000,(10000))
    ...: limit = 500
    ...: 

In [53]: %timeit np.argmin(np.ma.MaskedArray(a, a<limit))
1000 loops, best of 3: 233 µs per loop

In [54]: %timeit masked_argmin(a,limit)
10000 loops, best of 3: 101 µs per loop

In [55]: # Inputs
    ...: a = np.random.randint(0,1000,(100000))
    ...: limit = 500
    ...: 

In [56]: %timeit np.argmin(np.ma.MaskedArray(a, a<limit))
1000 loops, best of 3: 1.73 ms per loop

In [57]: %timeit masked_argmin(a,limit)
1000 loops, best of 3: 1.03 ms per loop