[SciPy-Dev] cKDTree

[Sturla Molden]

Sylvain Corlay <sylvain.corlay at gmail.com> wrote:

> On the subject of the use of a faster flavor of KdTree as I was proposing,

There are many flavours of spatial search trees. Some are fast to build,
some are fast to query. Some support any distance measure, some support
arbitrary distance measures. Some support periodic spaces, others do not.
For example, SciPy's cKDTree support periodic spaces for cosmology
simulations. Scikit-learn's KDTree and BallTree do not because their scope
is different (only machine learning). In theory one could add different
flavours of spatial search in scipy.spatial. kd-trees, ball-trees,
PCA-trees, and vp-trees all have their merits. We must keep the API
consistent. The code must be maintainable. The code must be maintained. The
main thing, as I see it, is to avoid the code rot that brought down
OpenSSL. SciPy is not a "dumping ground" for algorithms that someone has
found remotely useful at some point in time. SciPy is not a collection of
abandonware.

Sturla