[SciPy-user] suggestion for improving http://www.scipy.org/

[Travis Oliphant]

> Recently I wanted to find out 'Can scipy generate a random variable
> from a power law distribution'.  So I went to the site, and
> searched for 'power law random'.  Yow. 445 hits, none of which
> appear to have anything to do with generating random numbers,
> most of which are the empty home pages of people like me who have
> just joined the community.  Searching for 'power and law' did not
> help.
>
> So -- 1. is the search engine broken, or do you all know something I
> don't?  2.  Any chance of implementing a specialised search for
> 'Can Scipy do this?'

good idea.


A start in this direction is in SciPy.

If you type

info('powerlaw')

you get a reference to

the stats module.

info(stats.powerlaw) shows that this is a supported distribution.

Unfortunately, the docstring is not very informative due to the way I've
reconstructed the stats module to inherit from base classes (anybody who
could help me figure out how to make the doc strings more informative
would be appreciated).

For now you have to look at the continuous_distributions.lyx file for
information about all the supported distributions.   That file is quite
complete, and we should make an html page or a pdf file out of it.

Thanks for your input.

-Travis O.





-- 
Travis Oliphant
Assistant Professor
459 CB
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
Tel: (801) 422-3108
oliphant.travis at ieee.org