Find unique rows in numpy.array

Question

I need to find unique rows in a numpy.array.

For example:

>>> a # I have
array([[1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0],
       [0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0],
       [0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0],
       [1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0],
       [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0]])
>>> new_a # I want to get to
array([[1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0],
       [0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0],
       [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0]])

I know that i can create a set and loop over the array, but I am looking for an efficient pure numpy solution. I believe that there is a way to set data type to void and then I could just use numpy.unique, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work.

Answer 1

Beyond @Jaime excellent answer, another way to collapse a row is to uses a.strides[0] (assuming a is C-contiguous) which is equal to a.dtype.itemsize*a.shape[0]. Furthermore void(n) is a shortcut for dtype((void,n)). we arrive finally to this shortest version :

a[unique(a.view(void(a.strides[0])),1)[1]]

For

[[0 1 1 1 0 0]
 [1 1 1 0 0 0]
 [1 1 1 1 1 0]]

Answer 2

Based on the answer in this page I have written a function that replicates the capability of MATLAB's unique(input,'rows') function, with the additional feature to accept tolerance for checking the uniqueness. It also returns the indices such that c = data[ia,:] and data = c[ic,:]. Please report if you see any discrepancies or errors.

def unique_rows(data, prec=5):
    import numpy as np
    d_r = np.fix(data * 10 ** prec) / 10 ** prec + 0.0
    b = np.ascontiguousarray(d_r).view(np.dtype((np.void, d_r.dtype.itemsize * d_r.shape[1])))
    _, ia = np.unique(b, return_index=True)
    _, ic = np.unique(b, return_inverse=True)
    return np.unique(b).view(d_r.dtype).reshape(-1, d_r.shape[1]), ia, ic