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I'm looking for a way to do Matrix operations in PHP in an easy/efficient way.

I want to be able to do the basic Matrix operations like Invert, Multiply, Determinant, add, subtract, Solving Linear Equations Ax=B, transpose, etc.

I'm looking at small sized matrices (The matrix I want to inverse are at most 100x100, and the vectors I want to multiply/transpose may get to be 1000x1).

I found a PEAR package Math_Matrix but it seems neglected (I develop with E_STRICT and it throws many deprecated warnings). The other links I have found seems mostly broken and un-updated.

I found the Lapack PHP package but it doesn't have other operations like multiplication or subtraction or transpose.

I know another option is to use integration with other software like Octave or Sage however we aren't quite sure we want to do this yet (the Financial team despises the Python syntax and the IT team it's worried about the Octave overhead).

Is there any stand alone library that anyone uses for this kind of matrix operations that has all the basic operations and it's updated?

Eric Leschinski
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Jimmy
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  • A PHP port of JAMA is another I know that certainly has some of those operations, but probably equally dated. Michael Bommarito has done a [polyfit add-on](http://php.livejournal.com/270125.html) for it that may also be useful. However, any of those older libraries should give you the guts of the mathematics – Mark Baker Aug 21 '13 at 16:43
  • From the Octave/Sage point of view, I think it would be really helpful to know exactly what sort of matrices you are looking at. I assume they are of floating point numbers, and that they will not be the sort that are ill-conditioned for inversion numerically. Using numpy (with or without Sage) could be an option - but again, updating the question with a specific example (perhaps a link to it) would be really helpful. Naturally, R is another option. – kcrisman Aug 21 '13 at 16:50
  • I don't have a sample matrix yet to show. We are just raising the requirements/solutions for the upcoming project =/ But yes, they are float numbers for sure. – Jimmy Aug 22 '13 at 17:20
  • You can integrate with [R](http://www.rstudio.com/). – ilhan Dec 19 '13 at 11:41

2 Answers2

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Take a look at http://projects.moongate.ro/octave-daemon/

Some of the features that may reduce overhead and convince the IT team:

  • The daemon is accessible via network, which means you can move all Octave processes on a separate server, should you decide you need to

  • Octave processes are persistent, which means that: any data that has been loaded or computed in the past will still be available for newly-connected clients

  • startup times for new Octave processes don't affect clients.

  • Provides conversions between Octave matrices and PHP arrays.

Charity Leschinski
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  • I found this a while ago while googling on the same topic. Have you used it in production? Is it reliable and without memory leaks? – Jimmy Sep 02 '13 at 14:22
  • No, I haven't used it, but some of the features are interesting. I would put the daemon on it's own server with optimized hardware for running Octave. Make this server inaccessible to the Internet and keep it on the same network as the web server. That should minimize issues. – Charity Leschinski Sep 03 '13 at 12:46
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I'm answering my own question about a year later.

We went for another option, we coded our own small library in C++ and we compiled it and added it to php as an extension. This produced the best performance and the code kept being pretty.

$inverted = my_matrix_invert($matrixArray);

People looking to do this kind of things should look here: http://www.php-cpp.com

josliber
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Jimmy
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