One thing... I'm not sure why you think porting Netlab to SciPy would be such a huge task. It's a big task, sure. Porting to C++ would definitely be a huge task. But I would think porting to another high-level language like python would be a one-summer job for a reasonably clueful grad student. It's only 9000 lines of code excluding comments and blank lines: [BAXTER-PC<7>netlab]> egrep -v '(^%|^$)' *.m | wc 8971 41422 361276 I think converting 100 lines a day for 90 days is not unreasonable. That includes all the demos too. If you leave out the demos its about half that: [BAXTER-PC<18>netlab]> egrep -v '(^%|^\s*$)' `ls *.m | grep -v '^dem'` | wc 4171 18725 156628 Ok maybe it's still a little unreasonable. Alright, maybe it's not a 1-man summer job. I've also ignored testing and converting the comments, but the task is also fairly parallelizeable. Probably a little team of 3 eager new grad students could do a bang up job over a summer. --bb On 4/21/06, David Cournapeau <david@ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
Bill Baxter wrote:
By the way, I'd be interested in an n-dimension Gaussian function for NumPy/SciPy too.
Anyone else interested in machine learning and or bayesian methods? A port of Netlab ( http://www.ncrg.aston.ac.uk/netlab/index.php) in SciPy would be great. Actually, I am porting a code for Gaussian Mixture Models with batch and online EM. I first try to do a pure python version to get an idea on scipy capabilities, and then I intend to create the stub to a C implementation (which already exists for matlab, the core being independant of matlab). I am hoping to have a much cleaner implementation, and more extensible (ie using other pdf, and why not more general models) using python languages capabilities (module, inheritance, etc...).
I think porting netlab would be a huge task, and quite difficult; there is also torch ( http://www.torch.ch/) which may be interesting to use (C++ code, BSD license). Having a machine learning tool box would be a step forward for scipy, I guess.
David
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