[SciPy-dev] Ball Tree class

[Charles R Harris]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 10:13 AM, Jake VanderPlas <jakevdp at gmail.com> wrote:

> >Hi Jake and SciPy,
> >
> >I wonder what is the status of this endeavor?
> >
> >For our little project we need fast search for a spherical neighborhood
> >in a cloud of points.  Only now I discovered that scipy has KDTree and
> >cKDTree which could be  used, BUT both interfaces are somewhat
> >misfit for this simple goal one way or another.
> >
> >Also I've ran into libkdtree++ library with Python bindings which seems
> >to do close what I need (just does range search, not sphere but it could
> >be more or less efficiently computed post-hoc) and do it very
> >efficiently upon my simple tests: http://libkdtree.alioth.debian.org/
> >but it is under Artistic License 2.0...  but may be it might be of use
> >to inspire modification of scipy's ways to interface with the user
> >;)
> >
> >And Jake, how are you going along with your project since there were no
> >follow ups on this thread I wonder if there was any progress?
>
> Yaroslav,
> I have not done much more since the previous emails.  I got the
> impression from people's responses that the community is not
> interested in this code until it can be both more general and more
> complete (allowing for flexible distance metrics, multiple data types,
> approximate searches, alternate tree construction schemes, etc.)
>

This is a common problem in open source, propose something simple and you
get asked to undertake world domination ;) I think simple Euclidean
distances and double would be a good start as long as the design doesn't
require a complete refactoring to add more general metrics. The code itself
needs a lot of style fixes. If you don't have the time maybe Yaroslav can
pick it up.

Chuck
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