Overview

Introduction

The scikits.sparse package is a companion to the scipy.sparse library for sparse matrix manipulation in Python. All scikits.sparse routines expect and return scipy.sparse matrices (usually in CSC format). Unlike SciPy proper, scikits.sparse is covered by the GPLv2+ (see the file COPYING for details), and thus can take advantage of GPL’ed code like SuiteSparse.

Currently our coverage is rather... sparse, with only a wrapper for the CHOLMOD routines for sparse Cholesky decomposition, but we hope that this will expand over time. Contributions of new wrappers are very welcome, especially if you can follow the style of the existing interfaces.

Download

The current release may be downloaded from the Python Package index at

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/scikits.sparse/

Or from the homepage at

http://code.google.com/p/scikits-sparse/downloads/list

Or the latest development version may be found in our Mercurial repository:

hg clone https://scikits-sparse.googlecode.com/hg/ scikits.sparse

Requirements

Installing scikits.sparse requires:

• Python
• NumPy
• SciPy
• Cython
• CHOLMOD

On Debian/Ubuntu systems, the following command should suffice:

apt-get install python-scipy libsuitesparse-dev

Note

If you work out more detailed instructions for some other system, then please drop us a note so that they may be included here.

Installation

If you have easy_install installed, then a simple

easy_install -U scikits.sparse

should get you the latest version. Otherwise, download and unpack the source distribution, and then run

python setup.py install

Contact

Post your suggestions and questions directly to the mailing list (scikits-sparse-discuss@lists.vorpus.org), or to our bug tracker. You may also contact Nathaniel Smith directly.