[Python-Dev] PEP 450 adding statistics module

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Sep 9 13:56:05 CEST 2013


On 9 Sep 2013 20:46, "Skip Montanaro" <skip at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> > However, it's common in economic statistics to have a rectangular
> > array, and extract both certain rows (tuples of observations on
> > variables) and certain columns (variables).  For example you might
> > have data on populations of American states from 1900 to 2012, and
> > extract the data on New England states from 1946 to 2012 for analysis.
>
> When Steven first brought up this PEP on comp.lang.python, my main concern
> was basically, "we have SciPy, why do we need this?" Steven's response,
which
> I have come to accept, is that there are uses for basic statistics for
> which SciPy's
> stats module would be overkill.
>
> However, once you start slicing your data structure along more than one
axis, I
> think you very quickly will find that you need numpy arrays for
performance
> reasons, at which point you might as go "all the way" and install SciPy.
I don't
> think slicing along multiple dimensions should be a significant concern
for this
> package.
>
> Alternatively, I thought there was discussion a long time ago about
> getting numpy's
> (or even further back, numeric's?) array type into the core. Python
> has an array type
> which I don't think gets a lot of use (or love). Might it be
> worthwhile to make sure the
> PEP 450 package works with that? Then extend it to multiple dimensions?
Or just
> bite the bullet and get numpy's array type into the Python core once
> and for all?
>
> Sort of Tulip for arrays...

Aka memoryview :)

Stefan Krah already fixed most of the multidimensional support issues in
3.3 (including the "cast" method to reinterpret the contents in a different
format). The main missing API elements are multidimensional slicing and the
ability to export them from types defined in Python.

Cheers,
Nick.

>
> Skip
> _______________________________________________
> Python-Dev mailing list
> Python-Dev at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
> Unsubscribe:
https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/ncoghlan%40gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20130909/72a66d88/attachment.html>


More information about the Python-Dev mailing list