[SciPy-dev] Statistics review months

[Robert Kern]

Eric Jonas wrote:
> Robert, 
> 
>>In the interest of improving the quality of the scipy.stats package,
>>I hereby declare April and May of 2006 to be Statistics Review
>>Months. I propose that we set ourselves a goal to review each
>>function in stats.py and morestats.py (and a few others) for
>>correctness and completeness of implementation by the end of
> 
> What a great idea! We had just started working on this ourselves.
> We're going to migrate some of our internal wiki content over to the
> trac pages over the next few days, regarding rv_continuous and
> rv_discrete. In particular, the distributions implementation is both
> very well-designed and very bug-ridden.

Yes. Given the number of functions in stats.py and the number of distributions
(multiplied by the number of methods each distribution has), I thought it best
to focus on the functions this time around. But please do add the Wiki pages so
we can keep track of this! If this procedure works well, I'm sure we will do a
Distributions Review Month soon.

> While we're doing this level of refactoring, perhaps more attention
> could be given to fernando's "scikit" idea? If we're going to invest
> this much time in a module, perhaps it would be a good time to
> consider cleaning up the interface, and even writing a good how-to
> guide, ala the matlab toolbox users guides...

Good point. I will add a Wiki page where reviewers can add examples and HOWTO
text for each function as they work their way down the list. When the reviewing
settles down, that would be the perfect time for some reorganization and editing
work to form a coherent user's guide for scipy.stats.

-- 
Robert Kern
robert.kern at gmail.com

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
 that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
 an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco