How can the Euclidean distance be calculated with NumPy?

Question

I have two points in 3D:

(xa, ya, za)
(xb, yb, zb)

And I want to calculate the distance:

dist = sqrt((xa-xb)^2 + (ya-yb)^2 + (         


        

Answer 1

For anyone interested in computing multiple distances at once, I've done a little comparison using perfplot (a small project of mine).

The first advice is to organize your data such that the arrays have dimension (3, n) (and are C-contiguous obviously). If adding happens in the contiguous first dimension, things are faster, and it doesn't matter too much if you use sqrt-sum with axis=0, linalg.norm with axis=0, or

a_min_b = a - b
numpy.sqrt(numpy.einsum('ij,ij->j', a_min_b, a_min_b))

which is, by a slight margin, the fastest variant. (That actually holds true for just one row as well.)

The variants where you sum up over the second axis, axis=1, are all substantially slower.

---

Code to reproduce the plot:

import numpy
import perfplot
from scipy.spatial import distance


def linalg_norm(data):
    a, b = data[0]
    return numpy.linalg.norm(a - b, axis=1)


def linalg_norm_T(data):
    a, b = data[1]
    return numpy.linalg.norm(a - b, axis=0)


def sqrt_sum(data):
    a, b = data[0]
    return numpy.sqrt(numpy.sum((a - b) ** 2, axis=1))


def sqrt_sum_T(data):
    a, b = data[1]
    return numpy.sqrt(numpy.sum((a - b) ** 2, axis=0))


def scipy_distance(data):
    a, b = data[0]
    return list(map(distance.euclidean, a, b))


def sqrt_einsum(data):
    a, b = data[0]
    a_min_b = a - b
    return numpy.sqrt(numpy.einsum("ij,ij->i", a_min_b, a_min_b))


def sqrt_einsum_T(data):
    a, b = data[1]
    a_min_b = a - b
    return numpy.sqrt(numpy.einsum("ij,ij->j", a_min_b, a_min_b))


def setup(n):
    a = numpy.random.rand(n, 3)
    b = numpy.random.rand(n, 3)
    out0 = numpy.array([a, b])
    out1 = numpy.array([a.T, b.T])
    return out0, out1


perfplot.save(
    "norm.png",
    setup=setup,
    n_range=[2 ** k for k in range(22)],
    kernels=[
        linalg_norm,
        linalg_norm_T,
        scipy_distance,
        sqrt_sum,
        sqrt_sum_T,
        sqrt_einsum,
        sqrt_einsum_T,
    ],
    logx=True,
    logy=True,
    xlabel="len(x), len(y)",
)