Question: I'm trying to port a program which uses a hand-rolled interpolator (developed by a mathematician colleage) over to use the interpolators provided by scipy. I'd like to use or wrap the scipy interpolator so that it has as close as possible behavior to the old interpolator.

A key difference between the two functions is that in our original interpolator - if the input value is above or below the input range, our original interpolator will extrapolate the result. If you try this with the scipy interpolator it raises a `ValueError`. Consider this program as an example:

```
import numpy as np
from scipy import interpolate

x = np.arange(0,10)
y = np.exp(-x/3.0)
f = interpolate.interp1d(x, y)

print f(9)
print f(11) # Causes ValueError, because it's greater than max(x)

```

Is there a sensible way to make it so that instead of crashing, the final line will simply do a linear extrapolate, continuing the gradients defined by the first and last two points to infinity. 

Note, that in the real software I'm not actually using the exp function - that's here for illustration only!

Answer: 
As of SciPy version 0.17.0, there is a new option for [scipy.interpolate.interp1d](http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.interpolate.interp1d.html) that allows extrapolation. Simply set fill\_value='extrapolate' in the call. Modifying your code in this way gives:

```
import numpy as np
from scipy import interpolate

x = np.arange(0,10)
y = np.exp(-x/3.0)
f = interpolate.interp1d(x, y, fill_value='extrapolate')

print f(9)
print f(11)

```

and the output is:

```
0.0497870683679
0.010394302658

```
Here's an alternative method that uses only the numpy package. It takes advantage of numpy's array functions, so may be faster when interpolating/extrapolating large arrays:

```
import numpy as np

def extrap(x, xp, yp):
    """np.interp function with linear extrapolation"""
    y = np.interp(x, xp, yp)
    y = np.where(x<xp[0], yp[0]+(x-xp[0])*(yp[0]-yp[1])/(xp[0]-xp[1]), y)
    y = np.where(x>xp[-1], yp[-1]+(x-xp[-1])*(yp[-1]-yp[-2])/(xp[-1]-xp[-2]), y)
    return y

x = np.arange(0,10)
y = np.exp(-x/3.0)
xtest = np.array((8.5,9.5))

print np.exp(-xtest/3.0)
print np.interp(xtest, x, y)
print extrap(xtest, x, y)

```

Edit: Mark Mikofski's suggested modification of the "extrap" function:

```
def extrap(x, xp, yp):
    """np.interp function with linear extrapolation"""
    y = np.interp(x, xp, yp)
    y[x < xp[0]] = yp[0] + (x[x<xp[0]]-xp[0]) * (yp[0]-yp[1]) / (xp[0]-xp[1])
    y[x > xp[-1]]= yp[-1] + (x[x>xp[-1]]-xp[-1])*(yp[-1]-yp[-2])/(xp[-1]-xp[-2])
    return y

```