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StreamPress I/O: Read, Write, and Inspect Compressed Matrices

Source: R/streampress.R
streampress.Rd

Functions for reading and writing matrices in StreamPress (.spz) format. StreamPress achieves 5-10x compression over raw float32 CSC binary on typical scRNA-seq sparse matrices using rANS entropy coding. Beyond storage savings, SPZ is also faster to read than raw CSC binary at any thread count: the bottleneck in reading large sparse matrices is sparse object construction (sorting indices, allocating R/Eigen structures), which SPZ parallelises across independent chunks while raw CSC must perform sequentially.

Details

StreamPress (.spz) supports two format versions:

  • v2 (sparse): Column-oriented compressed CSC format. Lossless, 5-10x compression over raw float32 CSC. Self-describing header.

  • v3 (dense): Column-major dense panels with optional FP16/QUANT8/rANS compression. For streaming NMF on dense data.

See also

st_write, st_read, st_info, st_write_dense, st_read_dense