pydata / pydata/xarray

Support alignment/broadcasting with unlabeled dimensions of size 1

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API design design question
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Python
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Description

Sometimes, it's convenient to include placeholder dimensions of size 1, which allows for removing any ambiguity related to the order of output dimensions.

Currently, this is not supported with xarray:

>>> xr.DataArray([1], dims='x') + xr.DataArray([1, 2, 3], dims='x')
ValueError: arguments without labels along dimension 'x' cannot be aligned because they have different dimension sizes: {1, 3}

>>> xr.Variable(('x',), [1]) + xr.Variable(('x',), [1, 2, 3])
ValueError: operands cannot be broadcast together with mismatched lengths for dimension 'x': (1, 3)

However, these operations aren't really ambiguous. With size 1 dimensions, we could logically do broadcasting like NumPy arrays, e.g.,

>>> np.array([1]) + np.array([1, 2, 3])
array([2, 3, 4])

This would be particularly convenient if we add keepdims=True to xarray operations (#2170).

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the DataArray and Variable examples in the issue and tracing xarray's alignment and broadcasting behavior for unlabeled dimensions. Done means size-1 dimensions broadcast like NumPy arrays without changing the labeled-dimension behavior, with tests covering both examples.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
numpy, python
Domain
data
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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