[Numpy-discussion] Release of SciPy Core 0.4 (Beta)

[Tim Churches]

Paul F. Dubois wrote:
> I was going to see if I could port MA. It is pure Python so shouldn't be
> too hard.

That would eb a most welcome development. If you are in the mood for
some minor extensions to MA (you probably aren't, but just on the
off-chance...), then support for multiple masking values would be great.
In other words, instead of the mask just taking the values zero or one,
it can also take 2, 3, etc (within the constraints of the Int8 data
type), where any non-zero value means masked. That would allow the
reason why a value in an array is masked to be neatly encoded, not just
the fact that it is masked (missing). For example, in (human) survey
data, a scalar value (eg age at menopasue) may be missing because the
respondent did not meet the precondition(s) for the question (eg sex not
female), or because they have not yet undergone menopause, or because
they refuse to answer, or because they don't know or don't recall.
That's at least 4 different reasons why the value may be missing
(masked). But don't ask me the the mask value should be when you
multiply a masked-because-not-asked value by a
masked-because-refused-to-answer value. Perhaps a reasonable rule would
be max(mask0,mask1)?

Tim C

> 
> Tim Churches wrote:
> 
>> Travis Oliphant wrote:
>>
>>> This is to announce the release of SciPy Core 0.4.X (beta)
>>>
>>> It is available at sourceforge which you can access by going to
>>>
>>> http://numeric.scipy.org
>>>
>>> Thanks to all who helped me with this release, especially
>>>
>>> Robert Kern
>>> Pearu Peterson
>>>
>>> Now, let's start getting this stable....
>>
>>
>>
>> Great work, and we are much relieved that NumPy has a firm future
>> (albeit under a different name).
>>
>> However, can I ask if there are plans to add Masked Arrays to SciPy
>> Core? If not, we'll have to stick with NumPy - missing values are
>> ubiquitous in the biological sciences and any package which can't handle
>> them isn't, to put it bluntly, of much use. We are happy to help test MA
>> for SciPy Core, and our project (www.netepi.org) has over a thousand
>> unit tests which give the basics of NumPy and MA a good work-out - so
>> if/when we convert to SciPy Core the unit tests will be helpful. However
>> we are not familiar enough with how SciPy Core differs from NumPy to
>> help with the porting, I'm afraid.
>>
>> Tim C
>>
>>
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