Sparse Matrices and Machine Precision
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I have a large sparse matrix, K. My problem is that over time some values in K that where once non-zero will change to zero through some matrix calculations. However, due to floating point precision inaccuracies the values don't reach exactly zero. Thus Matlab allows these near zero values to be represented as non-zero values.
Currently my solution is
K(abs(K)<threshold) = 0;
where threshold is some small value. This does help, however this operation is slow and as K is changed by matrix operations often, it needs to be re-run often.
Is there a way to force sparse matrices to see values smaller than a certain threshold as zero? Or is there another solution?
Thanks
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Accepted Answer
John D'Errico
on 6 Jan 2012
There is no way to do so in the existing sparse form, and you would not want that behavior to exist in many linear algebra operations. As linear algebra goes, it is a rather nonlinear thing.
You can always just store the non-zero elements separately, implicitly building your own sparse form.
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More Answers (1)
James Tursa
on 6 Jan 2012
If you are really desperate for speed one could write a mex routine to do this operation in-place. My guess is it probably wouldn't take too much time ... but that is just a guess. You would have to manually call this function, however. As John noted, you cannot make MATLAB automatically do this for all of your linear algebra calculations.
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James Tursa
on 7 Jan 2012
No. I mean have MATLAB do the matrix multiplication, but after the fact have a mex routine clean it of small values in-place.
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