python - Numpy histogram of large arrays

Question

I have a bunch of csv datasets, about 10Gb in size each. I'd like to generate histograms from their columns. But it seems like the only way to do this in numpy is to first load the entire column into a numpy array and then call numpy.histogram on that array. This consumes an unnecessary amount of memory.

Does numpy support online binning? I'm hoping for something that iterates over my csv line by line and bins values as it reads them. This way at most one line is in memory at any one time.

Wouldn't be hard to roll my own, but wondering if someone already invented this wheel.

Answer 1

As you said, it's not that hard to roll your own. You'll need to set up the bins yourself and reuse them as you iterate over the file. The following ought to be a decent starting point:

import numpy as np
datamin = -5
datamax = 5
numbins = 20
mybins = np.linspace(datamin, datamax, numbins)
myhist = np.zeros(numbins-1, dtype='int32')
for i in range(100):
    d = np.random.randn(1000,1)
    htemp, jnk = np.histogram(d, mybins)
    myhist += htemp

I'm guessing performance will be an issue with such large files, and the overhead of calling histogram on each line might be too slow. @doug's suggestion of a generator seems like a good way to address that problem.