Coordinate Format A file format suitable for representing general sparse matrices. Only nonzero entries are provided, and the coordinates of each nonzero entry is given explicitly. This is illustrated in the example below. Array Format A file format suitable for representing general dense matrices. Several instances of each of these basic formats are defined.
MM coordinate format is suitable for representing sparse matrices.
Only nonzero entries need be encoded, and the coordinates of each are given explicitly. This is illustrated in the following example of a real 5x5 general sparse matrix. 12 In MM coordinate format this could be represented as follows. The first line contains the type code. In this example, it indicates that the object being represented is a matrix in coordinate format and that the numeric data following is real and represented in general form.