[SciPy-user] interpolate package - scale-dependent?

[Frank Gibbons]

I must confess I'm not much of an expert on interpolation. However, I was 
playing around with the interpolate package today, trying to figure out why 
the quality of the spline returned appears to vary with the scale of the 
data: some data (set of (x,y) pairs) that produce a good spline, when the 
y's are divided by a factor of 100, produce a really poor one.

Maybe there are some assumptions about scale inherent in the spline 
algorithm, perhaps relating to the stiffness of the curves. Still, I 
figured that should be user-adjustable. If it is, how do I do it? If not, 
shouldn't there be some documentation on the effective scales that will work?

Regarding docs for that package, they're very hard to read in their current 
form, because each argument's description runs into that of the one that 
follows it. But it turns out, if you put a blank line between the argument 
descriptions, then HappyDoc generates far more legible output. I don't know 
what the formatting rules for HappyDoc are, but wanted to share:

This will cause the output to be run together: "x -- first arg y -- second arg"
x -- first arg
y -- second arg

Putting a space between those lines generates:

x
         first arg
y
         second arg


Readable docs are important in my opinion. Is this a problem with other 
packages too? Perhaps we can come up with a script to fix it SciPy-wide.

-Frank Gibbons

PhD, Computational Biologist,
Harvard Medical School BCMP/SGM-322, 250 Longwood Ave, Boston MA 02115, USA.
Tel: 617-432-3555       Fax: 
617-432-3557       http://llama.med.harvard.edu/~fgibbons