[SciPy-user] [SciPy-dev] Statistics review months

[Webb Sprague]

I just wanted to add my two cents to the how should we incorporate
statistics into scipy question.  Take it with all the grains of salt
necessary.... I might be able to  play a statistician on TV, but not
much more...

Point 1:  One of the *nicest* things about R (and I suppose S-Plus) is
that when you do a statistical procedure, even a simple regression, it
calculates all sorts of useful stuff for you, from diagnostic plots to
all that fancy ANOVA stuff to the residuals etc, and stores it in an
object that you can manipulate later.  I am not sure how to do this
"pythonically" in scipy, but I think it should be considered when we
design a stats extension.

Point 2:  One of the most *annoying* things about R/S-Plus is that it
assumes a user-interaction paradigm rather than a server paradigm.  I
think that as we conceptualize a scipy extension we should remember
that a lot of people might want to do something like make statistical
analyses available through a web interface (one reason for using for
going with Python for me, anyway) and relying on a X system, on the
fly generated graphics, a persistent session across commands, etc,
would make that extremely difficult (I tried...).  At the very least,
I would need to be able to pickle the analysis results and save them
in a database, retrieving both data and graphics (or nicely
re-generating the graphics) later.

Anyway, I just wanted to get that off my chest.  I hope it makes the
world a better place :)