Converting bsxfun with @times to numpy

Question

This is the code I have in Octave:

sum(bsxfun(@times, X*Y, X), 2)

The bsxfun part of the code produces element-wise multiplication so I thought that numpy.multiply(X*Y, X) would do the trick but I got an exception. When I did a bit of research I found that element-wise multiplication won't work on Python arrays (specifically if X and Y are of type "numpy.ndarray"). So I was wondering if anyone can explain this a bit more -- i.e. would type casting to a different type of object work? The Octave code works so I know I don't have a linear algebra mistake. I'm assuming that bsxfun and numpy.multiply are not actually equivalent but I'm not sure why so any explanations would be great.

I was able to find a website! that gives Octave to Matlab function conversions but it didn't seem to be help in my case.

Answer 1

bsxfun in Matlab stand for binary singleton expansion, in numpy it's called broadcasting and should happen automatically. The solution will depend on the dimensions of your X, i.e. is it a row or column vector but this answer shows one way to do it:

How to multiply numpy 2D array with numpy 1D array?

I think that the issue here is that broadcasting requires one of the dimensions to be 1 and, unlike Matlab, numpy seems to differentiate between a 1 dimensional 2 element vector and a 2 dimensional 2 element, i.e. the difference between a matrix of shape (2,) and of shape (2,1), you need the latter for broadcasting to happen.