scipy integrate over array with variable bounds

Question

I am trying to integrate a function over a list of point and pass the whole array to an integration function in order ot vectorize the thing. For starters, calling scipy.integrate.quad is way too slow since I have something like 10 000 000 points to integrate. Using scipy.integrate.romberg does the trick much faster, almost instantaneous while quad is slow since you must loop over it or vectorize it.

My function is quite complicated, but for demonstation purpose, let's say I want to integrate x^2 from a to b, but x is an array of scalar to evaluate x. For example

import numpy as np

from scipy.integrate import quad, romberg

def integrand(x, y):   

    return x**2 + y**2


quad(integrand, 0, 10, args=(10) # this fails since y is not a scalar

romberg(integrand, 0, 10)  # y works here, giving the integral over
                           # the entire range 

But this only work for fixed bounds. Is there a way to do something like

z = np.arange(20,30)
romberg(integrand, 0, z)  # Fails since the function doesn't seem to
                          # support variable bounds

Only way I see it is to re-implement the algorithm itself in numpy and use that instead so I can have variable bounds. Any function that supports something like this? There is also romb, where you must supply the values of integrand directly and a dx interval, but that will be too imprecise for my complicated function (the marcum Q function, couldn't find any implementation, that could be another way to dot it).

Answer 1

The best approach when trying to evaluate a special function is to write a function that uses the properties of the function to quickly and accurately evaluate it in all parameter regimes. It is quite unlikely that a single approach will give accurate (or even stable) results for all ranges of parameters. Direct evaluation of an integral, as in this case, will almost certainly break down in many cases.

That being said, the general problem of evaluating an integral over many ranges can be solved by turning the integral into a differential equation and solving that. Roughly, the steps would be

1. Given an integral I(t) which I will assume is an integral of a function f(x) from 0 to t [this can be generalized to an arbitrary lower limit], write it as the differential equation dI/dt = f(x).
2. Solve this differential equation using scipy.integrate.odeint() for some initial conditions (here I(0)) over some range of times from 0 to t. This range should contain all limits of interest. How finely this is sampled depends on the function and how accurately it needs to be evaluated.
3. The result will be the value of the integral from 0 to t for the set of t we input. We can turn this into a "continuous" function using interpolation. For example, using a spline we can define i = scipy.interpolate.InterpolatedUnivariateSpline(t,I) .
4. Given a set of upper and lower limits in arrays b and a , respectively, then we can evaluate them all at once as res=i(b)-i(a) .

Whether this approach will work in your case will require you to carefully study it over your range of parameters. Also note that the Marcum Q function involves a semi-infinite integral. In principle this is not a problem, just transform the integral to one over a finite range. For example, consider the transformation x->1/x. There is no guarantee this approach will be numerically stable for your problem.