[Numpy-discussion] how to name "contagious" keyword in np.ma.convolve

Pierre Haessig pierre.haessig at crans.org
Mon Oct 17 13:01:14 EDT 2016


Hi,


Le 16/10/2016 à 11:52, Hanno Klemm a écrit :
> When I have similar situations, I usually interpolate between the valid values. I assume there are a lot of use cases for convolutions but I have difficulties imagining that ignoring a missing value and, for the purpose of the computation, treating it as zero is useful in many of them. 
When estimating the autocorrelation of a signal, it make sense to drop
missing pairs of values. Only in this use case, it opens the question of
correcting or not correcting for the number of missing elements  when
computing the mean. I don't remember what R function "acf" is doing.


Also, coming back to the initial question, I feel that it is necessary
that the name "mask" (or "na" or similar) appears in the parameter name.
Otherwise, people will wonder : "what on earth is contagious/being
propagated...."

just thinking of yet another keyword name  : ignore_masked (or drop_masked)

If I remember well, in R it is dropna. It would be nice if the boolean
switch followed the same logic.

Now of course the convolution function is more general than just
autocorrelation...

best,
Pierre

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