[SciPy-dev] SciPy improvements

[David Cournapeau]

Matthieu Brucher 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?
>
>
> Don't scipy have SVMs already ? Perhaps not as modularized at it could 
> be ?
> PPCA is PCA IIRC (Tipping 97, it's part of my Phd thesis), KPCA is not 
> a big deal if kernels are in a module, and if they have a method 
> taking 2 arguments. BTW, even the svd could directly take a kernel as 
> an argument, the default kernel being the scalar product ?
> I'm in favour of fine-grained modules - like for the optimisation 
> module I proposed -, and allowing pepole to choose which kernel they 
> want, even if the kernel was designed for SVM, is a good thing, the 
> "kernel trick" should be almost universal :)
The project is first about unifying *existing* packages: basically, make 
them first class citizen doc-wise and api-wise, so that they can be 
moved out of the sandbox. SVM, EM for mixture fall in this category.

cheers,

David