"LapackError: Parameter a has non-native byte order in lapack_lite.dgesdd" when importing from Matlab files - matlab

Question

After importing this data file from Matlab with scipy.io.loadmat, things appeared to work fine until we tried to calculate the conditioning number of one of the matrixes within.
Here's the minimum amount of code that reproduces for us:
import scipy
import numpy
stuff = scipy.io.loadmat("dati-esercizio1.mat")
numpy.linalg.cond(stuff["A"])
Here's the extended stacktrace courtesy of iPython:
In [3]: numpy.linalg.cond(A)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
LapackError Traceback (most recent call last)
/snip/<ipython-input-3-15d9ef00a605> in <module>()
----> 1 numpy.linalg.cond(A)
/snip/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/linalg/linalg.py in cond(x, p)
1409 x = asarray(x) # in case we have a matrix
1410 if p is None:
-> 1411 s = svd(x,compute_uv=False)
1412 return s[0]/s[-1]
1413 else:
/snip/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/linalg/linalg.py in svd(a, full_matrices, compute_uv)
1313 work = zeros((lwork,), t)
1314 results = lapack_routine(option, m, n, a, m, s, u, m, vt, nvt,
-> 1315 work, -1, iwork, 0)
1316 lwork = int(work[0])
1317 work = zeros((lwork,), t)
LapackError: Parameter a has non-native byte order in lapack_lite.dgesdd
All obvious ideas (like flattening and reshaping the matrix or recreating the matrix from scratch reassigning it element by element) failed. How can I want to massage the data, then, in order to make it more agreeable with numpy?

Answer 1

It's a bug, fixed some time ago: https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/235
Workaround:
np.linalg.cond(stuff['A'].newbyteorder('='))

Answer 2

This works for me:
In [33]: stuff = loadmat('dati-esercizio1.mat')
In [34]: a = stuff['A']
In [35]: try: np.linalg.cond(a)
....: except: print "Fail!"
Fail!
In [36]: b = np.array(a, dtype='>d')
In [37]: np.linalg.cond(b)
Out[37]: 62493201976.673141
In [38]: np.all(a == b) # Verify they hold the same data.
Out[38]: True

Answer 3

Apparently it's something wrong with the byte order (endianness?) of each number in the resulting ndarray and not just with the ndarray object itself.
Something like this but more elegant should do the trick:
n, m = A.shape()
B = numpy.empty_like(A)
for i in xrange(n):
for j in xrange(m):
B[i,j] = float(A[i,j])
del A
B = A
print numpy.linalg.cond(A) # 62493210091.354507
(For some reason an in-place replacement still gives that error - so there's something wrong with the byte order of the whole object, too.)