[SciPy-Dev] GSoC'15 Idea: Approximation with Parametric Splines

[Ralf Gommers]

Hi Anastasiia, welcome!


On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 10:25 AM, Anastasiia Tsyplia <
anastasiyatsyplya at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> My name is Anastasiia Tsyplia. I am a 5th-yaer student of National Mining
> University of Ukraine.
>
> I am keen on interpolation/approximation with splines and it was a nice
> surprise to find out that there is a demand in interpolation improvements
> amongst the Scipy's ideas for GSoC'15. However, I've spend some time on
> working out the idea
> <https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzveGSDwNVtBanU1THpFTXNKZHc/view?usp=sharing>
> of my own.
>
> Recently I've made a post <http://tsplb.blogspot.com/> dedicated to
> description of the parametric spline curves construction process and
> approaches to approximate engineering data by spline functions and
> parametric spline curves with SciPy.
>

Nice blog post!
I'll leave the commenting on technical details you have in your draft
proposal to Evgeni and others, just want to say you've made a pretty good
start so far.

>  It seems that using parametric spline curves in approximation can be
> extremely useful and time-saving approach. That's why I would like to share
> my project idea and hope to hear some feedback as I am about to make a
> proposal for the Google Summer of Code.
>
> I have a 2-year experience in programming with Python, PyOpengl, PyQt,
> Matplotlib, Numpy & SciPy. Some time I spent to dive into ctypes and
> scratched the surface of C. Now my priority is Cython. I've read the book
> on the spline methods recommended on SciPy's idea page, so I feel myself
> competent in spline methods. I feel free with recursions: the last
> challenge I faced was implementation of binary space partitioning algorithm
> in python as I was writing my own ray-tracer.
>
> I would like to contribute to SciPy by any means, so I'm ready to receive
> instructions on my next move. And, certainly I'm looking forward to start
> dealing with B-Splines in Cython as it is also a part of my project idea.
>

What I recommend to all newcomers is to start by reading
https://github.com/scipy/scipy/blob/master/HACKING.rst.txt and then first
tackly an issue labeled "easy-fix", just to get a feel for the
development/PR process.

I've checked open issues for Cyhon code, there aren't that many at the
moment. Maybe something fun could be to take some code now using np.ndarray
and change it to use memoryviews (suggestion by @jakevdp that in
scipy.sparse.csgraph this could help). And include a benchmark to show that
it does speed things up (seehttps://
github.com/scipy/scipy/tree/master/benchmarks for details).

Regarding B-splines there's https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/3423, but
I don't recommend tackling that now - that'll be a significant amount of
work + discussion.

Cheers,
Ralf
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