[SciPy-Dev] Sensitivity analysis module proposal

[Robert Kern]

On Mon, Apr 12, 2021 at 3:50 AM Pamphile Roy <roy.pamphile at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you for your detailed reply Robert.
>
> On 11.04.2021, at 19:55, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "It exists elsewhere" isn't my argument. While this is obviously a
> judgement call, and my opinion isn't necessarily that of anyone else's, I
> do have a rough rubric in mind when I consider things for inclusion in
> scipy. The main guiding principle is to make important functionality
> available to the scientific Python community. If including that
> functionality in scipy advances that, great, that's an argument for
> inclusion. But sometimes, inclusion inside scipy is just a neutral move,
> and I think that's the case here. That's not dispositive, but then we have
> to go to more specific reasons, like wanting to use the functionality
> inside other parts of scipy (like QMC in SHGO).
>
>
> I guess this will be very subjective. As for the scientific impact, I will
> just point out that the known textbooks about SA have thousands of
> citations and are involved with policy-makers through things like JRC, EU.
> Cf. people like Andrea Saltelli, Stefano Tarantola, IM Sobol’.
>

To be clear, I'm taking the importance of methods as a given. Your original
email was quite convincing on that matter.


> If the SALib developers expressed interest in merging SALib into scipy,
> that'd be one thing. But if they are interested in maintaining it as an
> independent project, I would recommend contributing to it to build on their
> success instead of starting from scratch. As a tentpole project of the
> scientific Python community, we want to support the efforts of the whole
> community, not replace them or absorb them.
>
>
> Just to clarify that my proposal does not seek to eat other libraries,
> more to provide the basic tools for them.
>

The issue as I see it is that SALib *is* the basic toolset that you would
want to have. It's not a fancy, heavy UQ framework. It's just some
functions to compute some sample points for your model to evaluate and
other functions to spit out sensitivity reports on those evaluations. If
SALib is missing a few more tools, I encourage contributing them to SALib
and not scipy.

-- 
Robert Kern
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