nnls 0.1.0

Non-Negative Least Squares (nnls)
Documentation

nnls

This is a Rust version of nnls (Non-Negative Least Square). It's a port from a Fortran90 script used by scipy.optimize.nnls and probablys everal others.

Why?

I decided to port nnls to Rust because:

  • The C version of nnls is not thread-safe! There are several static variables throughout the code which it unusable in parallel. If you plan to use nnls only in single-thread, you might prefer linkking to that version: it has been heavily tested and has no known problem.
  • Both Fortran versions (77 and 90) require some knowledge of Fortran memory model and some compiler tricks to successfuly link against. I wasn't able to do it and I didn't want to waste more hours into this adventure, so I simply ported the script to Rust.

Advantages

  • It has been used several millions of times and it will be used billions of times quite soon. I work with 3D images and each image I see contains around 1 million voxels. For a specific algorithm, I need to call nnls 2 times for each voxel. Several of those images has been tested and compared with the original Fortran version.
  • There's no unsafe and it is forbidden to use any.

Problems

  • This is not idiomatic Rust. I tried cleaning and enhancing the code but this is not always possible.
  • I use ndarray. You might prefer something else. I do not plan to change this but you're welcome to discuss it.
  • I currently receive reference to owned data instead of views. Just open an issue or a PR if you need views.
  • There are currently 3 panic! in the code because there are 3 code paths in the original code which use goto that I couldn't translate properly to Rust. I planned to handle those cases but it turns out that ther are never called. As I wrote, nnls has been extensively used and I couldn't find any dataset that triggers those conditions. If my programs ever panic because of this, I'll found a solution!