Sparse matrices are matrices whose values are mostly zero values. They occur naturally when working with certain kinds of data problems such as natural language processing (NLP), data counting events (such as customers' purchases), categorical data transformed into binary variables (a technique called one-hot-encoding, which we will be discussing in the next chapter), or even images if they have lots of black pixels.
sparse matrices with the right tools because they represent a memory and computational challenge for most machine learning algorithms. First of all, sparse matrices are huge (if treated as a normal matrix, they cannot fit into memory) and they mostly contain zero values but for a few cells. Data structures ...