[SciPy-dev] Volunteer for Scipy Project

[Anne Archibald]

2009/10/5 David Goldsmith <d.l.goldsmith at gmail.com>:
> Just curious, Anne: have you anything in particular in mind (i.e., are there
> some small - or gaping - holes in scipy (IYO, of course) which you know
> could be filled by a careful implementation of something(s) extant in the
> literature)?

Well, not exactly - the examples I had in mind were minor and/or in
the past. I ran into problems with scipy's hyp2f1, for example, so I
went and looked up the best algorithm I could find for it (and I think
I contributed that code). I wanted the Kuiper test as an alternative
to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (it's invariant under cyclic
permutations, and is sensitive to different features of the
distribution) so I looked up the test and the special function needed
to interpret its results. (I haven't contributed this to scipy yet,
mostly because I chose an interface that's not particularly compatible
with that for scipy's K-S test.) And on a larger scale, that's what
scipy.spatial's kdtree implementation is.

For examples where I think a bit of lit review plus implementation
work might help, I'd say that the orthogonal polynomials could use
some work - the generic implementation in scipy.special falls apart
rapidly as you go to higher orders. I always implement my own
Chebyshev polynomials using the cos(n*arccos(x)) expression, for
example, and special implementations for the others might be very
useful.

Anne