[SciPy-Dev] cKDTree

[Sturla Molden]

Robert Lucente <rlucente at pipeline.com> wrote:
 
> I noticed in a recent email that cKDTree was mentioned.
> 
> Q: What is the relationship if any between SciPy an scikit-learn when it comes to cKDTree?

The scope of the projects are slightly different. E.g. SciPy allows period
query spaces for cosmology simulations. Scikit-learn allows arbitrary
distance measures for machine learning. SciPy only allows a small set of
distance measures (Minkowski distances) for performance. SciPy releases the
GIL for user interfaces, games, parallel processing and computer graphics.
For this reason all the heavy lifting is done in C++. I am not sure about
scikit-learn, but it is written in Cython which usually has somewhat less
room for GIL release. SciPy support parallel (multithreaded) queries in two
of the methods. I think scikit-learn depends on joblib for parallel
processing. There are different authors. The kd-tree and ball-tree in
scikit-learn was written by Jake Vanderplas. cKDTree was mainly written by
Anne Archibald, me and Yu Feng. 


Sturla