On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Jaakko Luttinen <jaakko.luttinen@aalto.fi> wrote:
Hi!

I have two comments about scipy.spatial distance functions.

First, scipy/spatial/src/distance.c contains several interesting
distance measures. However, the vector versions are not visible outside
the file because they are not declared in distance.h (for instance,
euclidean_distance). Only the pdist_* and cdist_* versions are made
visible. I would like to use the "raw" distance measures directly for
some other functions, so would it be ok to introduce those in distance.h?

I don't see a problem with that.
 
Second, squared Euclidean distance is computed by taking the square of
the Euclidean distance. I think it would make more sense to do it the
other way around: the Euclidean distance is computed by taking the
square root of the squared Euclidean distance.

Makes sense, should be a little faster.

If these suggestions are ok, I can try to implement them or how should I
proceed? Or any other comments?

Implementing them and sending a pull request would be good.

If you're familiar with these metrics, perhaps you also have an opinion on these two tickets:
http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/ticket/1484
http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/ticket/1486
It seems that the definition of a couple of the metrics is incorrect.

Ralf