[Numpy-discussion] anyone to look at #1402?

[David Warde-Farley]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 11:56:34PM -0800, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> So there's this patch I submitted:
>   http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/ticket/1402
> Obviously not that high a priority in the grand scheme of things (it
> adds a function to compute the log-determinant directly), but I don't
> want to release a version of scikits.sparse with this functionality
> while the numpy patch is hanging in needs-review status (since the API
> might change), so it's a bit of a blocker for me. Anyone have a minute
> to take a look?

I'm not someone who can act on it, but FWIW I am very much +1 on this
addition, and the patch looks solid to me. It'd definitely be useful in
scikits.learn, maybe scipy.stats/scikits.statsmodels too.

The name is a bit awkward, but I can't think of a better one. My first
instinct would be to look for "logdet", but I would also not expect such
a function to return the log determinant *and* the sign of the 
determinant.

David