On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn <da...@student.matnat.uio.no> wrote: > > Jason Grout wrote: >> Carlo Hamalainen wrote: >>> On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 7:46 PM, Jason Grout >>> <jason-s...@creativetrax.com> wrote: >>>> R has a C interface for lots of functions (like the distribution >>>> functions that I wanted today). I imagine that a stats module would use >>>> Cython to call the C functions for these sorts of things, but then use >>>> rpy2 for the rest of the interaction with R. >>> Which distribution functions did you want? Are these of any use? >>> http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/6827 >> >> Wow, nice! >> >> I needed normal, binomial, and uniform distributions. >> >> It seems a little awkward to get these. For example: >> >> T = RealDistribution('uniform', [0, 2]) >> >> I guess it would be nice if there were convenience functions, so >> >> sage.probability.uniform([0,2]) >> >> constructed this. > > I already regularily use two APIs for probability distributions: R and > SciPy. Both do essentially the same thing (quantiles, integrals, > densities, and random variates -- all numerical). > > I can understand that the R API perhaps isn't elegant enough to import > into Sage as is, but perhaps the SciPy API could at least be emulated > rather than creating a new API? > > http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/stats.html > http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.stats.uniform.html > > (With regards to creating Cython wrappers directly to C functions, I'd > rather use the SciPy functionality, which is essentially the same thing, > only that no reimplementation of the wheel is needed.) >
I'm confused. Above Jason says: "Scipy also does some of this stuff, but R is *much* better. For example, R has *nine* different quartile algorithms you can choose from (compared to scipy's one, and matplotlib's sort of broken one (it doesn't calculate quartiles between data points)). R also has the advantage of being vetted/used by a huge statistics community." I have also looked a lot at Scipy's stats, and it seems overall not nearly as good as R's. But you're claiming they are "essentially the same thing". William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
