a. | 1. | Thinly scattered; set or planted here and there; not being dense or close together; |
2. | (Bot.) Placed irregularly and distantly; scattered; - applied to branches, leaves, peduncles, and the like. | |
v. t. | 1. | To scatter; to disperse. |
Adj. | 1. | sparse - not dense; "a thin beard"; "trees were sparse" Synonyms: thin |
sparse - A sparse matrix (or vector, or array) is one in which most of the elements are zero. If storage space is more important than access speed, it may be preferable to store a sparse matrix as a list of (index, value) pairs or use some kind of hash scheme or associative memory. |