[SciPy-Dev] Speaking of tickets...

[Bruce Southey]

On 03/31/2010 12:57 PM, Robert Kern wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 11:32,<josef.pktd@gmail.com>  wrote:
>    
>> On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 1:15 AM, Warren Weckesser
>> <warren.weckesser@enthought.com>  wrote:
>>      
>>> Just curious: what are the plans for the "Statistic Review" tickets in
>>> scipy.stats, from April, 2006?  Can any of these be closed?
>>>        
>> short answer:
>> I looked at them and there are several that can be closed, especially
>> the functions that have been removed or depreciated. For others, I
>> have to check my notes to see which ones I verified and added tested.
>>
>>
>> long answer (this were my initial notes when I browsed the tickets):
>>
>> I found them very inconvenient to work with. Many or most of them are
>> empty and I didn't find an easy way to get an overview which ones of
>> the tickets contain useful information and require attention.
>>      
> Well, the point of them was to systematically review every function.
> Those "empty" tickets need just as much attention as those that have
> comments.
>
> However, it's obvious that I dropped the ball on organizing that
> effort. They may be systematically closed now.
>
>    
Really these functions do need to be addressed but it is rather daunting 
task to go through all these functions especially for the assigned 
criteria and given the 'duplicated' masked array functions. There are 
about 187 functions involved in stats modules - although some are 
deprecated and 'redefinition' of existing functions. Some of the 
functions are more utilities than stats functions and some functions are 
very dimension specific. For example, there is a tmean(a, 
limits=(min,max)) function that is essentially doing "a.compress((a>min) 
& (a<max)).mean()" because there is no axis option. Then there is a 
masked array function, trimmed_mean, that does have an axis argument.

However, I came to the conclusion that most of these have more problems 
than they are worth making my original idea worthless. So it would be 
better to have a clear plan for a proper set of statistical functions 
than just 'blindly fixing' the existing functions.


Bruce