I will show you how to use numpy to permute a vector. Permuting a vector means rearranging its elements in a different order, according to some rule or pattern. For example, if we have a vector [1, 2, 3, 4], we can permute it by swapping the first and last elements, resulting in [4, 2, 3, 1].
There are many ways to permute a vector, but one of the most common and useful ones is to use a permutation matrix. A permutation matrix is a square matrix that has exactly one 1 in each row and column, and 0s everywhere else. For example, the following matrix is a permutation matrix:
[[0, 0, 1, 0],
[1, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 0, 0]]
To permute a vector using a permutation matrix, we simply multiply the vector by the matrix. For example, if we want to permute the vector [1, 2, 3, 4] using the above matrix, we do:
[1, 2, 3, 4] * [[0, 0, 1, 0],
[1, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 0, 0]]
= [3, 1, 4, 2]
This is equivalent to swapping the first and third elements and the second and fourth elements of the vector.
Numpy provides a convenient function to create permutation matrices: np.eye(n)[p], where n is the size of the matrix and p is a list of indices that specify how to permute the rows. For example,
np.eye(4)[[2, 0 ,3 ,1]]
= [[0., 0., 1., 0.],
[1., 0., 0., 0.],
[0., 0., 0., 1.],
[0., 1., 0., 0.]]
This is the same permutation matrix as before.
To permute a vector using numpy’s function, we can do:
v = np.array([1 ,2 ,3 ,4])
p = [2 ,0 ,3 ,1]
v_permuted = v @ np.eye(4)[p]
= array([3., 1., 4., 2.])
This is the same result as before.
Permuting vectors can be useful for many applications, such as shuffling data for randomization or encryption. Numpy makes it easy to perform this operation with just a few lines of code.