In computer programming, a matrix can be defined with a 2-dimensional array. Any array with 'm' columns and 'n' rows represents a mXn matrix. There may be a situation in which a matrix contains more number of ZERO values than NON-ZERO values. Such matrix is known as sparse matrix.
"Sparse matrix is a matrix which contains very few non-zero elements."
When a sparse matrix is represented with 2-dimensional array, we waste lot of space to represent that matrix. For example, consider a matrix of size 100 X 100 containing only 10 non-zero elements. In this matrix, only 10 spaces are filled with non-zero values and remaining spaces of matrix are filled with zero. That means, totally we allocate 100 X 100 X 2 = 20000 bytes of space to store this integer matrix. And to access these 10 non-zero elements we have to make scanning for 10000 times.