[SciPy-dev] Please help prepare the 0.7 release notes

[Pierre GM]

On Dec 9, 2008, at 10:18 AM, josef.pktd@gmail.com wrote:

> I added a section about the changes in scipy stats to the release
> notes, see below.
>
> I'm not sure how stable the API for the masked methods in
> scipy.stats.mstats are.

Quick answer: relatively stable.
Longer answer: I developed those routines because I direly needed them  
at that point. I tried to followed the original (ie, non-masked)  
interface, but never tried to make sure it was completely  
compatiblel.  An example of potential problem is kendall_seasonal: I  
used a dictionary to store the results, it may not be the best (most  
intuitive) kind of results, but keep in mind that without user  
feedback, I could only use what *I* needed. I'd be more than happy to  
switch it to something that would make more sense to the community.
For the algorithms: here again, I followed the basic (non-masked)  
ones. Quite often, the masked adaptation consists in getting rid of  
the masked data before process. In some other cases, the masked data  
are taken into account (for example for ranking). In yet some other  
cases, I was unhappy with the way the functions were actually  
implemented and tried to come up with an alternative, irrespectively  
of the presence of masked data (eg: mquantiles. R offers several  
options to compute experimental quantiles, in hydrology we have the  
need for several estimators, and the original stats version was, let's  
put it diplomatically, a bit to simple for my taste). In all cases, I  
double-triple checked results with stats books I had access to.
So yes, work is needed. I'm kinda swamped for the next couple of  
weeks, unfortunately, but I must also warn you that there'd be no way  
I can do that alone, once again because of the lack of feedback. I  
haven't heard anything about this module since I put it in scipy,  
about 8-9 months ago... So I assumed that there was no real problem  
with it.
Josef, thanks a million for getting into it, don't hesitate to contact  
me offlist if you have specific questions, and we can go back to the  
list for community feedback.