Saving mat files in different numerical data formats in scipy.io.savemat

Question

I know this is very simple and I can't believe I haven't found anything on this anywhere but here it goes:

I have a large, high dimensional matrix in python that I want to save in .mat format (for matlab). I'm using the scipy.io.savemat method to save this matrix but it's always saved as double. I would like to save it as something of lower precision, like single or 16 bit float.

I convert the array to a low-precision data type before saving but it's always saved as double. Is there really no way of saving mat files in a lower-precision float type?

.savemat does not seem to take a dtype argument.

 import scipy as sp
 sp.io.savemat('test.mat', {'test': sp.array([0.001, 1, 1.004], dtype='Float16')})

Answer 1

Apparently it needs to be either single or double. scipy.io.savemat() does not support other float precisions and it'll casually default to double if it doesn't like your dtype without warning.