[SciPy-dev] Scikits for optimization ?

[Michael McNeil Forbes]

Hi Matthieu,

I have been busy lately, but I have been thinking about optimization,  
especially the interface to optimizers and I think that the current  
optimization module could do with a lot of cleaning up, but I have  
not had time to flesh out a full proposal yet.  (I started to do this  
on the Trac Wiki but need to think this through more carefully).

Basically, there is very little cohesion with the various optimizers:  
they just wrap underlying fortran routines.  The arguments do not  
even have the same name.  It would be nice to flesh out a consistent  
interface and way of dealing with the plethora of options.  Once a  
consistent interface is established, then it would be easier to  
include additional optimizers built out of modules.

Once this is set up, I think it would be good to have this in SciPy  
itself rather than a scikit because optimization is a core scientific  
task, but perhaps a scikit is a good place to start (also, a scikit  
is the only option if any code has an incompatible licence).

Michael.

On 11 May 2007, at 12:18 AM, Matthieu Brucher wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I posted by proposal to the scipy TAC page, but I'm wondering if it  
> wouldn't be better to provide a "toolbox", so then a scikit instead  
> of wanting to put in scipy.
> My change of thought started from the fact that scipy has very good  
> optimizers at this point, and my proposal is for people that want  
> to use very specific algorithms and to tweak them. And isn't that  
> what scikits were made for ?
>
> Matthieu