Fast interpolation over 3D array

Question

I have a 3D array that I need to interpolate over one axis (the last dimension). Let\'s say y.shape = (nx, ny, nz), I want to interpolate in nz for

Answer 1

Building on @pv.'s answer, and vectorising the inner loop, the following gives a substantial speedup (EDIT: changed the expensive numpy.tile to using numpy.lib.stride_tricks.as_strided):

import numpy
from scipy import interpolate

nx = 30
ny = 40
nz = 50

y = numpy.random.randn(nx, ny, nz)
x = numpy.float64(numpy.arange(0, nz))

# We select some locations in the range [0.1, nz-0.1]
new_z = numpy.random.random_integers(1, (nz-1)*10, size=(nx, ny))/10.0

# y is a 3D ndarray
# x is a 1D ndarray with the abcissa values
# new_z is a 2D array

def original_interpolation():
    result = numpy.empty(y.shape[:-1])
    for i in range(nx):
        for j in range(ny):
            f = interpolate.interp1d(x, y[i, j], axis=-1, kind='linear')
            result[i, j] = f(new_z[i, j])

    return result

grid_x, grid_y = numpy.mgrid[0:nx, 0:ny]
def faster_interpolation():
    flat_new_z = new_z.ravel()
    k = numpy.searchsorted(x, flat_new_z)
    k = k.reshape(nx, ny)

    lower_index = [grid_x, grid_y, k-1]
    upper_index = [grid_x, grid_y, k]

    tiled_x = numpy.lib.stride_tricks.as_strided(x, shape=(nx, ny, nz), 
        strides=(0, 0, x.itemsize))

    z_upper = tiled_x[upper_index]
    z_lower = tiled_x[lower_index]

    z_step = z_upper - z_lower
    z_delta = new_z - z_lower

    y_lower = y[lower_index]
    result = y_lower + z_delta * (y[upper_index] - y_lower)/z_step

    return result

# both should be the same (giving a small difference)
print numpy.max(
        numpy.abs(original_interpolation() - faster_interpolation()))

That gives the following times on my machine:

In [8]: timeit foo.original_interpolation()
10 loops, best of 3: 102 ms per loop

In [9]: timeit foo.faster_interpolation()
1000 loops, best of 3: 564 us per loop

Going to nx = 300, ny = 300 and nz = 500, gives a 130x speedup:

In [2]: timeit original_interpolation()
1 loops, best of 3: 8.27 s per loop

In [3]: timeit faster_interpolation()
10 loops, best of 3: 60.1 ms per loop

You'd need a write your own algorithm for cubic interpolation, but it shouldn't be so hard.