Sparse storage formats

CSR

There are a variety of matrix storage formats available for representing the sparse matrix. One of the most popular is compressed sparse row (CSR) format, that is represented by three arrays: row_ptr, col_ind and val, and index parameter.

nrows	Number of rows in the sparse matrix.
ncols	Number of columns in the sparse matrix.
nnz	Number of non-zero entries in the sparse matrix (which may include explicit zeros). This is also the length of the col_ind and val arrays.
index	Parameter that is used to specify whether the matrix has zero or one-based indexing.
val	An array of length nnz that contains the non-zero elements of the sparse matrix stored row by row.
col_ind	An integer array of length nnz. Contains column indices for non-zero elements stored in the val array such that col_ind[i] is the column number (using zero- or one-based indexing) of the element of the sparse matrix stored in val[i].
row_ptr	An integer array of size equal to nrows + 1. Element j of this integer array gives the position of the element in the val array that is first non-zero element in a row j of A. Note that this position is equal to row_ptr[j] - index. Last element of the row_ptr array (row_ptr[nrows]) stores the sum of, number of nonzero elements and index (nnz + index).

A sparse matrix can be represented in a CSR format in a following way (assuming zero-based indexing):

\[\begin{split}A = \left(\begin{matrix} 1 & 0 & 2\\ 0 & -1 & 4\\ 3 & 0 & 0\\ \end{matrix}\right)\end{split}\]

nrows	3
ncols	3
nnz	5
index	0
val	1	2	-1	4	3
col_ind	0	2	1	2	0
row_ptr	0	2	4	5

Parent topic: Sparse BLAS