[Numpy-discussion] NEP: Random Number Generator Policy (original) (raw)

josef.pktd at gmail.com josef.pktd at gmail.com
Mon Jun 4 01:25:53 EDT 2018

On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 12:53 AM, Stephan Hoyer <shoyer at gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jun 3, 2018 at 8:22 PM Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:

It may be worth having a look at test suites for scipy, statsmodels, scikit-learn, etc. and estimate how much work this NEP causes those projects. If the devs of those packages are forced to do large scale migrations from RandomState to StableState, then why not instead keep RandomState and just add a new API next to it?

Tests that explicitly create RandomState objects would not be difficult to migrate. The goal of "StableState" is that it could be used directly in cases where RandomState is current used in tests, so I would guess that "RandomState" could be almost mechanistically replaced by "StableState". The challenging case are calls to np.random.seed(). If no replacement API is planned, then these would need to be manually converted to use StableState instead. This is probably not too onerous (and is a good cleanup to do anyways) but it would be a bit of work.

I agree with this. Statsmodels uses mostly np.random.seed. That cleanup is planned, but postponed so far as not high priority. We will have to do it eventually.

The main work will come when StableState doesn't include specific distribution, Poisson, NegativeBinomial, Gamma, ... and distributions that we don't even use yet, like Beta. I don't want to migrate random number generation for the distributions abandoned by numpy Stable to statsmodels.

Josef

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