[SciPy-dev] Summer of Code: Proposal for Implementing date/time types in NumPy

[Marty Fuhry]

-theflamingchicken



On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 12:50 PM, Travis E. Oliphant
<oliphant at enthought.com> wrote:
> Matt Knox wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>> I was reading through the Summer of Code ideas and I'm terribly
>>> interested in date/time proposal
>>> (http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/browser/trunk/doc/neps/datetime-proposal3.rst).
>>> I would love to work on this for a Google Summer of Code project. I'm
>>> a sophmore studying Computer Science and Mathematics at Kent State
>>> University in Ohio, so this project directly relates to my studies. Is
>>> there anyone looking into this proposal yet?
>>>
>>>
>>> You might want to cross post on the numpy mailing list also just to make sure
>>> Francesc sees it. Note also the recent post by Matt Knox (Recommended
>>> compiler...), he and Pierre might also be interested in this work.
>>>
>>
>> Not to discourage anyone from working on this, but since my name was brought up
>> I'll just mention that I am not personally that interested in this project as
>> the scikits.timeseries package fulfills my needs for handling date/time data. We
>> use an integer array with some meta data to represent the "dates" portion of our
>> TimeSeries class and it seems to work fairly well for the most part. It isn't
>> very often I need to store dates for the actual "values" in an array (as opposed
>> to just representing the time dimension), but for the odd occasion that I do I
>> find using an object dtype array with standard datetime values to be sufficient.
>>
>> That being said, the timeseries module is not the silver bullet for every need
>> and does have limitations that are addressed in this proposal such as
>> frequencies higher than seconds (microsecond, etc), but again these aren't
>> interesting to me personally given the type of data I work with. And things like
>> "Quarterly frequency with different origins" (mentioned at the bottom of the
>> proposal) are very important for the timeseries module but considered out of
>> scope for the date/time data type enhancement proposal.
>>
>
> I've had a chance recently to look at the Date class in the timeseries
> module and I liked the way it was put together.    I think it would
> benefit NumPy to have something like this class more tightly integrated
> with the NumPy distribution.
>
> My approach would be to make a NumPy dtype that is basically the Date
> class with more frequencies as taken from the date/time proposal.
> But, perhaps just pulling the DateArray into NumPy is a sufficient first
> step.
>
> -Travis
>
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>Do you know Laura Smithies? I was in graduate school with her.
Thanks, Chuck. I don't know any Laura Smithies, sorry.


>My approach would be to make a NumPy dtype that is basically the Date
>class with more frequencies as taken from the date/time proposal.
I'll be sure to take a look at the scikits.timeseries package before
writing up an application. Is this date / time proposal still a
candidate for GSoC?