[SciPy-dev] MCMC, Kalman Filtering, AI for SciPy?

[eric jones]

Charles Harris wrote:

> Pearu Peterson wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, Charles Harris wrote:
>>
>>> eric jones wrote:
>>>
>>>> Where should these live?
>>>> monte carlo and markov chain might fit in scipy.stats?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> How about in monte_carlo or some such? I think there is too much 
>>> stuff put in odd places. Why is zeros in optimize? Makes no sense, 
>>> but there it is.  I don't think now is the time to change all the 
>>> directories around, but I hope we give some thought to the 
>>> organization before it becomes unmanageable. The Dewey decimal 
>>> classification was an achievement I am coming to appreciate.
>>
>>
>>
>> I agree that tools provided by Scipy are not organized well with 
>> respect to the mathematical subject that they deal with and so 
>> finding the needed tool for some specific task may not be always 
>> easy. And I agree that this issue should be tackled as early stage as 
>> possible in Scipy evolution, otherwise it will get more and more 
>> difficult to decide where to put contributions from the society and 
>> there is a danger of postponing such decisions to an unreachable 
>> future..
>>
>> The current organization of Scipy packages is mostly based on underlying
>> Fortran/C libraries and that is obviously not the best way to organize
>> any high-level scientific tool.
>>
>> While Chuck mentioned Dewey decimal classification then there are other
>> classification schemes available. For example, MSC 
>> (http://www.ams.org/msc/). A nice overview of MSC can be found in
>>   http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/index/index.html
>>
>> I don't know how well could these classification schemes be used
>> for organizing Scipy packages, may be we should take a look how 
>> Matlab or Maple or Mathematica deal with organizing their tools.
>>
>>> From the maintenance point of view, IMHO, wrappers to external 
>>> Fortran/C 
>>
>>
>> libraries should be refactored from scipy packages to some "lib" 
>> package. For example, there would be packages like
>>
>>   scipy.lib.blas
>>   scipy.lib.lapack
>>   scipy.lib.fftpack
>>   scipy.lib.minpack
>>   scipy.lib.cephes
>>   scipy.lib.odepack
>>   scipy.lib.quadpack
>>   scipy.lib.fitpack
>>   scipy.lib.minpack
>>   scipy.lib.superlu
>>   scipy.lib.amos
>>   scipy.lib.cdflib
>>   etc
>>
> Hey, I like that idea a *lot*.

I think I do too.  It is mainly from a maintenance standpoint.  On the 
down side, it separates some code out that seems like it should live 
together.  But, it does remove some artificial constraints on function 
organization.

If we decide to do it, we should move to svn before we try it though.  
That kind of re-org in CVS makes me cringe...

eric