[SciPy-Dev] future of maxentropy module (was: sparse rmatvec and maxentropy)

[Ralf Gommers]

(excuse the cross-post, but this may be of interest to scipy-user and the
scikits.learn crowd)


On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 10:44 PM, <josef.pktd at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 8:50 AM, Ralf Gommers
> <ralf.gommers at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 10:13 PM, Skipper Seabold <jsseabold at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> I picked up the montecarlo code when I was playing around with these.
> >>
> >>
> http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jsseabold/statsmodels/statsmodels-skipper-maxent/files/head:/scikits/statsmodels/sandbox/maxentropy/<http://bazaar.launchpad.net/%7Ejsseabold/statsmodels/statsmodels-skipper-maxent/files/head:/scikits/statsmodels/sandbox/maxentropy/>
> >>
> >> I'm curious if the maxentropy stuff as it is in scipy wouldn't find
> >> more use and maintenance in scikits.learn.  The implementation is
> >> somewhat use specific (natural language processing), though this is
> >> not by any means set in stone.
> >>
> > Probably, but wouldn't it need a lot of work before it could be moved? It
> > has a grand total of one test, mostly non-working examples, and is
> obviously
> > hardly used at all (see r6919 and r6920 for more examples of broken
> code).
> >
> > Perhaps it's worth asking the scikits.learn guys, and otherwise consider
> > deprecating it if they're not interested?
>
> I haven't seen or heard anyone using it besides Skipper. There are
> also still some features that where designed for pysparse and never
> fully updated to scipy.sparse.
> http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/ticket/856
>
> I also thought deprecating and removing maxentropy will be the best
> idea, if nobody volunteers to give it a workout.
>

So I guess we just have to ask this out loud: is anyone using the
scipy.maxentropy module or interested in doing so? If you are, would you be
interested in putting some work into it, like making the examples work and
adding some tests?

The current status is that 3 out of 4 examples are broken, the module has
only a single test, and from broken code that went unnoticed for a long time
it is clear that there are very few users.

If no one steps up, I propose to deprecate the module for the 0.10 release.
If there are any users out there that missed this email and step up then, we
can always un-deprecate again.

To the scikits.learn developers: would this code fit better and see more use
in scikits.learn than in scipy? Would you be interested to pick it up?

Ralf
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