python - Shuffling NumPy array along a given axis

Question

Given the following NumPy array,

> a = array([[1, 2, 3, 4, 5], [1, 2, 3, 4, 5],[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]])

it's simple enough to shuffle a single row,

> shuffle(a[0])
> a
array([[4, 2, 1, 3, 5],[1, 2, 3, 4, 5],[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]])

Is it possible to use indexing notation to shuffle each of the rows independently? Or do you have to iterate over the array. I had in mind something like,

> numpy.shuffle(a[:])
> a
array([[4, 2, 3, 5, 1],[3, 1, 4, 5, 2],[4, 2, 1, 3, 5]]) # Not the real output

though this clearly doesn't work.

Answer 1

You have to call numpy.random.shuffle() several times because you are shuffling several sequences independently. numpy.random.shuffle() works on any mutable sequence and is not actually a ufunc. The shortest and most efficient code to shuffle all rows of a two-dimensional array a separately probably is

list(map(numpy.random.shuffle, a))

Some people prefer to write this as a list comprehension instead:

[numpy.random.shuffle(x) for x in a]