dimarray is a package to handle numpy arrays with labelled dimensions and axes. Inspired from pandas, it includes advanced alignment and reshaping features and as well as missing-value (NaN) handling.
The main difference with pandas is that it is generalized to N dimensions, and behaves more closely to a numpy array. The axes do not have fixed names ('index', 'columns', etc...) but are given a meaningful name by the user (e.g. 'time', 'items', 'lon' ...). This is especially useful for high dimensional problems such as sensitivity analyses.
A natural I/O format for such an array is netCDF, common in geophysics, which relies on the netCDF4 package, and supports metadata.
dimarray is distributed under a 3-clause ("Simplified" or "New") BSD license. Parts of basemap which have BSD compatible licenses are included. See the LICENSE file, which is distributed with the dimarray package, for details.
A ``DimArray`` can be defined just like a numpy array, with additional information about its dimensions, which can be provided via its axes and dims parameters:
>>> from dimarray import DimArray >>> a = DimArray([[1.,2,3], [4,5,6]], axes=[['a', 'b'], [1950, 1960, 1970]], dims=['variable', 'time']) >>> a dimarray: 6 non-null elements (0 null) 0 / variable (2): a to b 1 / time (3): 1950 to 1970 array([[ 1., 2., 3.], [ 4., 5., 6.]])
Indexing now works on axes
>>> a['b', 1970] 6.0
Or can just be done a la numpy, via integer index:
>>> a.ix[0, -1] 3.0
Basic numpy transformations are also in there:
>>> a.mean(axis='time') dimarray: 2 non-null elements (0 null) 0 / variable (2): a to b array([ 2., 5.])
Can export to pandas for pretty printing:
>>> a.to_pandas() time 1950 1960 1970 variable a 1 2 3 b 4 5 6
Documentation | http://dimarray.readthedocs.org |
Code on github (bleeding edge) | https://github.com/perrette/dimarray |
Code on pypi (releases) | https://pypi.python.org/pypi/dimarray |
Mailing List | http://groups.google.com/group/dimarray |
Issues Tracker | https://github.com/perrette/dimarray/issues |
Requirements:
- python 2.7
- numpy 1.7
Optional:
- netCDF4 1.0.8 (netCDF archiving) (see notes below)
- matplotlib 1.1 (plotting)
- pandas 0.11 (interface with pandas)
- cartopy 0.11 (dimarray.geo.crs)
Download the latest version from github and extract from archive Then from the dimarray repository type (possibly preceded by sudo):
python setup.py install
Alternatively, you can use pip to download and install the version from pypi (could be slightly out-of-date):
pip install dimarray
Installing the netCDF4 python module from source can be cumbersome, because it depends on netCDF4 and (especially) HDF5 C libraries that need to be compiled with specific flags (http://unidata.github.io/netcdf4-python).
For windows binaries are available, which is handy. On Ubuntu, I tried anaconda and it worked well (Enthought and xyPython might work as well). Download anaconda (full version) (http://continuum.io/downloads) or miniconda executable (http://conda.pydata.org/miniconda.html). This should make the conda command available. Then just do:
conda install netCDF4
The drawback is that everything then needs to happen within the anaconda/miniconda folder. I was not successful in using conda with a simple pip install conda and conda init.
All suggestions for improvement or direct contributions are very welcome. You can ask a question or start a discussion on the mailing list or open an issue on github for precise requests. See links.