Find the set difference between two large arrays (matrices) in Python

Question

I have two large 2-d arrays and I'd like to find their set difference taking their rows as elements. In Matlab, the code for this would be setdiff(A,B,'rows'). The arrays are large enough that the obvious looping methods I could think of take too long.

Answer 1

This should work, but is currently broken in 1.6.1 due to an unavailable mergesort for the view being created. It works in the pre-release 1.7.0 version. This should be the fastest way possible, since the views don't have to copy any memory:

>>> import numpy as np
>>> a1 = np.array([[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]])
>>> a2 = np.array([[4,5,6],[7,8,9],[1,1,1]])
>>> a1_rows = a1.view([('', a1.dtype)] * a1.shape[1])
>>> a2_rows = a2.view([('', a2.dtype)] * a2.shape[1])
>>> np.setdiff1d(a1_rows, a2_rows).view(a1.dtype).reshape(-1, a1.shape[1])
array([[1, 2, 3]])

You can do this in Python, but it might be slow:

>>> import numpy as np
>>> a1 = np.array([[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]])
>>> a2 = np.array([[4,5,6],[7,8,9],[1,1,1]])
>>> a1_rows = set(map(tuple, a1))
>>> a2_rows = set(map(tuple, a2))
>>> a1_rows.difference(a2_rows)
set([(1, 2, 3)])