On Sun, Jun 10, 2018 at 11:44 PM Ralf Gommers <ralf.gomm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Note that scipy.stats distributions allow passing in either a RandomState instance or an integer as seed (which will be used for seeding a new instance, not for np.random.seed) [1]. That seems like a fine design pattern as well, and passing on a seed that way is fairly easy and as good for reproducibility as passing in a single PRNG. > > [1] https://github.com/scipy/scipy/blob/master/scipy/stats/_distn_infrastructure.py#L612 Well, carefully. You wouldn't want to pass on the same integer seed to multiple functions. Accepting an integer seed is super-convenient at the command line/notebooks, though, or docstrings or in tests or other situations where your "reproducibility horizon" is small. These utilities are good for scaling from these small use cases to up to large ones. scikit-learn is also a good example of good PRNG hygiene: https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/blob/master/sklearn/utils/validation.py#L715 >> > Also, if there is to be a multi-year transitioning to the new API, would there be two PRNG systems anyway during those years? >> >> Sure, but with a deadline and not-just-documentation to motivate transitioning. >> >> But if we follow my alternative proposal, there'll be no need for deprecation! You've convinced me to not deprecate RandomState. > > That's not how I had read it, but great to hear that! Indeed, I did deprecate the name RandomState in that drafting, but it's not really necessary, and you've convinced me that we shouldn't do it. -- Robert Kern
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