Create block diagonal numpy array from a given numpy array

import numpy as np
from scipy.linalg import block_diag

a = np.array([[5, 7], 
              [6, 3]])

n = 3

d = block_diag(*([a] * n))

d

array([[5, 7, 0, 0, 0, 0],
       [6, 3, 0, 0, 0, 0],
       [0, 0, 5, 7, 0, 0],
       [0, 0, 6, 3, 0, 0],
       [0, 0, 0, 0, 5, 7],
       [0, 0, 0, 0, 6, 3]], dtype=int32)

But it looks like np.kron solution is a little bit faster for small n.

%timeit np.kron(np.eye(n), a)
12.4 µs ± 95.7 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100000 loops each)

%timeit block_diag(*([a] * n))
19.2 µs ± 34.1 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100000 loops each)

However for n = 300, for example, the block_diag is much faster:

%timeit block_diag(*([a] * n))
1.11 ms ± 32.1 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000 loops each)

%timeit np.kron(np.eye(n), a)
4.87 ms ± 31 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100 loops each)

For the specialized case of matrices, a simple slicing is WAY faster then numpy.kron() (the slowest) and mostly on par with numpy.einsum()-based approach (from @Divakar answer). Compared to scipy.linalg.block_diag(), it performs better for smaller arr, somewhat independently of number of block repetitions.

Note that the performances of block_diag_view() on smaller inputs can be easily further improved with Numba, but one would get worse performances for larger inputs.

With Numba, full explicit looping and parallelization (block_diag_loop_jit()) one would get again similar results as block_diag_einsum() if the number of repetitions is small.

Overall, the most performing solutions are block_diag_einsum() and block_diag_view().

import numpy as np
import scipy as sp
import numba as nb

import scipy.linalg


NUM = 4
M = 9


def block_diag_kron(arr, num=NUM):
    return np.kron(np.eye(num), arr)


def block_diag_einsum(arr, num=NUM):
    rows, cols = arr.shape
    result = np.zeros((num, rows, num, cols), dtype=arr.dtype)
    diag = np.einsum('ijik->ijk', result)
    diag[:] = arr
    return result.reshape(rows * num, cols * num)


def block_diag_scipy(arr, num=NUM):
    return sp.linalg.block_diag(*([arr] * num))


def block_diag_view(arr, num=NUM):
    rows, cols = arr.shape
    result = np.zeros((num * rows, num * cols), dtype=arr.dtype)
    for k in range(num):
        result[k * rows:(k + 1) * rows, k * cols:(k + 1) * cols] = arr
    return result


@nb.jit
def block_diag_view_jit(arr, num=NUM):
    rows, cols = arr.shape
    result = np.zeros((num * rows, num * cols), dtype=arr.dtype)
    for k in range(num):
        result[k * rows:(k + 1) * rows, k * cols:(k + 1) * cols] = arr
    return result


@nb.jit(parallel=True)
def block_diag_loop_jit(arr, num=NUM):
    rows, cols = arr.shape
    result = np.zeros((num * rows, num * cols), dtype=arr.dtype)
    for k in nb.prange(num):
        for i in nb.prange(rows):
            for j in nb.prange(cols):
                result[i + (rows * k), j + (cols * k)] = arr[i, j]
    return result

Benchmarks for NUM = 4:

Benchmarks for NUM = 400:

Plots were produced from this template using the following additional code:

def gen_input(n):
    return np.random.randint(1, M, (n, n))


def equal_output(a, b):
    return np.all(a == b)


funcs = block_diag_kron, block_diag_scipy, block_diag_view, block_diag_jit


input_sizes = tuple(int(2 ** (2 + (3 * i) / 4)) for i in range(13))
print('Input Sizes:\n', input_sizes, '\n')


runtimes, input_sizes, labels, results = benchmark(
    funcs, gen_input=gen_input, equal_output=equal_output,
    input_sizes=input_sizes)


plot_benchmarks(runtimes, input_sizes, labels, units='ms')

(EDITED to include np.einsum()-based approach and another Numba version with explicit looping.)