[Python-Dev] PEP 450 adding statistics module (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Sep 9 13:56:05 CEST 2013

On 9 Sep 2013 20:46, "Skip Montanaro" <skip at pobox.com> wrote:

> However, it's common in economic statistics to have a rectangular > array, and extract both certain rows (tuples of observations on > variables) and certain columns (variables). For example you might > have data on populations of American states from 1900 to 2012, and > extract the data on New England states from 1946 to 2012 for analysis. When Steven first brought up this PEP on comp.lang.python, my main concern was basically, "we have SciPy, why do we need this?" Steven's response, which I have come to accept, is that there are uses for basic statistics for which SciPy's stats module would be overkill. However, once you start slicing your data structure along more than one axis, I think you very quickly will find that you need numpy arrays for performance reasons, at which point you might as go "all the way" and install SciPy. I don't think slicing along multiple dimensions should be a significant concern for this package. Alternatively, I thought there was discussion a long time ago about getting numpy's (or even further back, numeric's?) array type into the core. Python has an array type which I don't think gets a lot of use (or love). Might it be worthwhile to make sure the PEP 450 package works with that? Then extend it to multiple dimensions? Or just bite the bullet and get numpy's array type into the Python core once and for all? Sort of Tulip for arrays...

Aka memoryview :)

Stefan Krah already fixed most of the multidimensional support issues in 3.3 (including the "cast" method to reinterpret the contents in a different format). The main missing API elements are multidimensional slicing and the ability to export them from types defined in Python.

Cheers, Nick.

Skip

Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev at python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/ncoghlan%40gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20130909/72a66d88/attachment.html>

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list