[SciPy-Dev] Sensitivity analysis module proposal (Robert Kern)

[William Usher]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for the response. You raise good points.

Obviously, that you are interested in the proposal assuages some of that, but I'm still unclear on why you are interested in this. What is the benefit that you think everyone will get by absorbing SALib into scipy? It still looks to me like a mostly-lateral move that will merely be disruptive to your dependent projects more than anything else.

The real value of SALib is in providing a consistent interface to a (large) suite of sensitivity analysis methods which allows users to easily switch between those methods.

We (as maintainers) could benefit from reducing duplication of code and implementations, such has Sobol’ sequence generation, LHS, and could contribute some of the more general sample generation implementations where appropriate (many are linked directly to the SA implementations and not useful outside of that).  We think the scientific community as a whole would benefit from the greater exposure a SciPy implementation of SA would bring - as a large community-led effort - it could provide a neutral forum for further development of these methods. This would likely come at some “cost” to the successful “cottage industry” we’ve established and grown (SALib is getting lots of citations and use). I think a key argument against integration is that it may reduce the agility with which we can add new methods to our SA suite (although this could be mitigated with careful design).

I think you raise an important point about our dependent projects, and particularly how we would continue to support legacy releases if developer resources were focussed on a SciPy integration?

An attraction is the possibility of funding to support the development of SA within SciPy.  Like all open-source projects, we suffer from resourcing issues, and are predominantly volunteer-driven from the academic community.  And while we are technically a “multi-developer” community, we’re only a few bus accidents (or career changes) away from being a lone-maintainer.

Will

From: Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com<mailto:robert.kern at gmail.com>>
Subject: Re: [SciPy-Dev] Sensitivity analysis module proposal
Date: 2 September 2021 at 16:14:13 CEST
To: SciPy Developers List <scipy-dev at python.org<mailto:scipy-dev at python.org>>
Cc: Jon Herman <jdherman at ucdavis.edu<mailto:jdherman at ucdavis.edu>>, Takuya Iwanaga <iwanaga.takuya at anu.edu.au<mailto:iwanaga.takuya at anu.edu.au>>


On Thu, Sep 2, 2021 at 9:12 AM William Usher <wusher at kth.se<mailto:wusher at kth.se>> wrote:
Hi;

I’m one of the maintainers of SALib<https://pypi.org/project/SALib/>, a Python library which offers implementations of popular global sensitivity analysis approaches including Sobol’, Morris, DMIM, DGSM, FAST and others.

We’ve been approached<https://github.com/SALib/SALib/issues/463> by roy.pamphile at gmail.com<mailto:roy.pamphile at gmail.com> regarding the possibility of either

- contributing the entire SALib library to SciPy, or
- contributing key functions from SALib to SciPy, keeping SALib as a user-friendly wrapper around the SciPy implementations + extensions that don’t fit within SciPy’s remit.

We believe that this move could overall benefit the scientific and sensitivity analysis communities.

I laid out my general rubric for considering absorbing functionality into scipy the last time this was brought up:

  https://mail.python.org/pipermail/scipy-dev/2021-April/024715.html

Obviously, that you are interested in the proposal assuages some of that, but I'm still unclear on why you are interested in this. What is the benefit that you think everyone will get by absorbing SALib into scipy? It still looks to me like a mostly-lateral move that will merely be disruptive to your dependent projects more than anything else.

--
Robert Kern


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