How to find index of minimum non zero element with numpy?
np.nonzero(theta)
returns the index of the values that are non-zero. In your case, it returns,
[1,2,3]
Then, theta[np.nonzero(theta)] returns the values
[1,2,3]
When you do np.argmin(theta[np.nonzero(theta)])
on the previous output, it returns the index of the value 1
which is 0.
Hence, the correct approach would be:
i,j = np.where( theta==np.min(theta[np.nonzero(theta)]))
where i,j
are the indices of the minimum non zero element of the original numpy array
theta[i,j]
or theta[i]
gives the respective value at that index.
I think you @Emily were very close to the correct answer. You said:
np.argmin(theta[np.nonzero(theta)])
gives an index of zero, which clearly isn't right. I think this is because it creates a new array of non zero elements first.
The last sentence is correct => the first one is wrong since it is expected to give the index in the new array.
Let's now extract the correct index in the old (original) array:
nztheta_ind = np.nonzero(theta)
k = np.argmin(theta[nztheta_ind])
i = nztheta_ind[0][k]
j = nztheta_ind[1][k]
or:
[i[k] for i in nztheta_ind]
for arbitrary dimensionality of original array.
#!/usr/bin/env python
# Solution utilizing numpy masking of zero value in array
import numpy as np
import numpy.ma as ma
a = [0,1,2,3]
a = np.array(a)
print "your array: ",a
# the non-zero minimum value
minval = np.min(ma.masked_where(a==0, a))
print "non-zero minimum: ",minval
# the position/index of non-zero minimum value in the array
minvalpos = np.argmin(ma.masked_where(a==0, a))
print "index of non-zero minimum: ", minvalpos