GSoC Is Over

Whoa, where did the last month go? The Google Summer of Code 2009 officially ended this Monday. Though I haven't taken a breath to update the blog, we (Josef and I) have been hard at work on the models code.

We have working and tested versions of Generalized Least Squares, Weighted Least Squares, Ordinary Least Squares, Robust Linear Models with several M-estimators, and Generalized Linear Models with support for all (almost all?) one parameter exponential family distributions. We have also provided some more convenience functions, created a standalone python package for the models code, and obtained permissions to distribute a few more datasets. Due to a lack of time, there is only experimental (read untested) support for autoregressive models, mixed effects models, generalized additive models, and convenience functions for returning strings (possibly html and latex output as well) with regression results and descriptive statistics. I will continue to work on these as I find time.

I will soon post a note on the progress that was made in the robust linear models code. Also, look out for a (semi-) official release of the code in the next few days. We have decided to name the project statsmodels and distribute it as a scikit. We need to finalize the documentation (should be ready to go in the next day or so...I am back taking courses) and clean up some of the usage examples, so people can jump right in and use the code, give feedback, and hopefully contribute extensions and new models.

As for the future of statsmodels, we are discussing over the next few weeks the immediate extensions that we know would like to make. It's looking like I will be wearing my microeconometrician hat this semester in my own coursework. More specifically, I will probably be working with cross-sectional and panel data models for household survey data in my own research and finding some time for time series models as part of my teaching assistantship. Josef has also mentioned wanting to work more with time series models.

If anyone (especially those from other disciplines) would like to contribute or see some extensions (my apologies to those who have made requests that I haven't yet been able to accomodate) feel free to post to the scipy-dev mailing list. I'm more than happy to discuss/debate with users and potential developers the design decisions that have been made, as I think the code is still in an unsettled enough state to merit some discussion.