Fastest way to populate a matrix with a function on pairs of elements in two numpy vectors?

Question

I have two 1 dimensional numpy vectors va and vb which are being used to populate a matrix by passing all pair combinations to a function.

Answer 1

Like @shx2 said, it all depends on what is foo. If you can express it in terms of numpy ufuncs, then use outer method:

In [11]: N = 400

In [12]: B = np.empty((N, N))

In [13]: x = np.random.random(N)

In [14]: y = np.random.random(N)

In [15]: %%timeit
for i in range(N):
   for j in range(N):
     B[i, j] = x[i] - y[j]
   ....: 
10 loops, best of 3: 87.2 ms per loop

In [16]: %timeit A = np.subtract.outer(x, y)   # <--- np.subtract is a ufunc
1000 loops, best of 3: 294 µs per loop

Otherwise you can push the looping down to cython level. Continuing a trivial example above:

In [45]: %%cython
cimport cython
@cython.boundscheck(False)
@cython.wraparound(False)
def foo(double[::1] x, double[::1] y, double[:, ::1] out):
    cdef int i, j
    for i in xrange(x.shape[0]):
        for j in xrange(y.shape[0]):
            out[i, j] = x[i] - y[j]
   ....: 

In [46]: foo(x, y, B)

In [47]: np.allclose(B, np.subtract.outer(x, y))
Out[47]: True

In [48]: %timeit foo(x, y, B)
10000 loops, best of 3: 149 µs per loop

The cython example is deliberately made overly simplistic: in reality you might want to add some shape/stride checks, allocate the memory within your function etc.