[Numpy-discussion] Suggestions for GSoC Projects

[Pauli Virtanen]

16.02.2014 23:34, Jennifer stone kirjoitti:
[clip]
> Yeah, many of the known failures seem to revolve around hyp2f1. An 
> unexplained inclination towards hypergeometric functions really
> tempts me to plunge into this. If it's too risky, I can work on
> this after the summers, as I would have gained quite a lot of
> experience with the code here.

If you are interested in the hypergeometric numerical evaluation, it's
probably a good idea to take a look at this recent master's thesis
written on the problem:

http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/porterm/research/pearson_final.pdf

This may give some systematic overview on the range of methods
available. (Note that for copyright reasons, it's not a good idea to
look closely at the source codes linked from that thesis, as they are
not available under a compatible license.)

It may well be that the best approach for evaluating these functions,
if accuracy in the whole parameter range is wanted, in the end turns
out to require arbitrary-precision computations.  In that case, it
would be a very good idea to look at how the problem is approached in
mpmath. There are existing multiprecision packages written in C, and
using one of them in scipy.special could bring better evaluation
performance even if the algorithm is the same.

-- 
Pauli Virtanen