issue_comments: 274375810

Interesting -- thanks for sharing! I am interested in performance improvements but also a little reluctant to add in specialized optimizations directly into xarray.

You write that this is equivalent to sum(a * w for a, w in zip(arrays, weights)). How does this compare to stacking doing the sum in xarray, e.g.,(arrays * weights).sum('stacked'), where arrays and weights are now DataArray objects with a 'stacked' dimension? Or maybe arrays.dot(weights)?

Using vectorized operations feels a bit more idiomatic (though also maybe more verbose). It also may be more performant. Note that the builtin sum is not optimized well by dask because it's basically equivalent to a loop: def sum(xs): result = 0 for x in xs: result += x return result In contrast, dask.array.sum builds up a tree so it can do the sum in parallel.

There have also been discussion in https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/422 about adding a dedicated method for weighted mean.