[SciPy-Dev] Adding a convenient method to create ufuncs in for scipy.stats

[Warren Weckesser]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 3:19 PM, Warren Weckesser <
warren.weckesser at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm working on an update to the Frechet distribution in scipy.stats (see
> https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/3258 and https://github.com/scipy/
> scipy/pull/3275).
>
> Instead jumping through the "lazy_where" hoops that are required for
> conditional computations, it would be much easier to create a ufunc for the
> standard PDF, CDF and possibly other required functions.  Easier, that is,
> if I use the ufunc generation tools that we have over in scipy.special.
> Would there be any objections to this?  We already have quite a few
> functions for probability distributions in scipy.special:
> https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/special.html#
> raw-statistical-functions
>
> I wouldn't mind creating ufuncs for some of the other distributions, too.
> A ufunc implementation is more efficient, simplifies the code in
> scipy.stats, and automatically handles broadcasting.
>
> I'm bringing this up here to see if anyone has any objections to the
> expansion of the statistical functions in scipy.special.
>
> Warren
>
>

In my previous email, the heading hints at an alternative that I didn't
mention in the text.  The question implied in the heading is: what do folks
think about adding ufunc generation tools to scipy.stats, instead of
generating the ufuncs in scipy.special.  There are a lot of conditional
computations in scipy.stats that would benefit from being implemented as
ufuncs, but probably don't need to be public functions.  So instead of
adding more functions to scipy.special, perhaps we could add code in
scipy.stats for generating ufuncs, many of which would be private.  Of
course, we could just generate private ufuncs in scipy.special, and only
use them in scipy.stats.

What do you think?

Warren
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