[SciPy-dev] SciPy improvements

[David Cournapeau]

Robert Kern wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>
>> The project page mentions SVM.  In addition to SVM I'm interested in
>> things like PPCA, kernel PCA, RBF networks, gaussian processes and
>> GPLVM.  Are you going to try to go in the direction of a modular
>> structure with reusable bits for for all kernel methods, or is the
>> plan to targeted specifically SVM?
>
> On that note, I have some Gaussian process code in a Mercurial repository here
> (click the "manifest" button to browse the source):
>
>   http://www.enthought.com/~rkern/cgi-bin/hgwebdir.cgi/gp/
>
> It's based on the treatment by Rasmussen and Williams:
>
>   http://www.gaussianprocess.org/gpml/
>
> The covariance functions I implement there might be useful in other methods, too.
>
Thanks for those links, I will take a look at the code you wrote.

Since you're here, I have some questions concerning chaco for the 
visualization part of the project. Basically, I am unsure about whether 
I should use chaco or matplotlitb. I do not know chaco very well yet, 
but it seems much better API and performance wise compared to matplotlib 
for interactive visualization. The problem is that it still does not 
have a lot of visibility to the community compared to matplotlib, and it 
is still pretty complicated to install. I do not care much about those 
points myself, but seeing how installation problems are one of the big 
difficulty for newcommers to numpy/scipy, I am a bit concerned. Is this 
impression funded, and if it is, is there a chance to see improvements 
on those fronts in the next few months ?

David