Re: Open source? -> Need to read source to model?

[Heinzelmann Matthias]

Hello!

Let me jump in on this discussion, which to mee seems to have evolved into
"where do we want to go with Swarm, what needs to be added in the future".
I have worked with Swarm for almost a year now. I was able do model some
financial simulations and I thought Swarm was a useful tool. (Why else
would I have used it this long).
However, two areas struck me that should be included in the Swarm package
that aren't as of right now. The sophisticated programmer might say this
is basic stuff, everybody has those libraries at home. But no, not
everybody does, and they are easy to make! They are out there a thousand
times, but it would be very helpful to include them in Swarm. After all,
Swarm is there to make life easier for the scientist, not for the
programmer. The two areas are:

- statistical libraries. What I really needed were functions that you give
an array of numbers to, or a list or a tree of numbers, and the output of
the function would be median, variance, this kind of stuff. not just the
arithmetic middle. Also, maybe some regression and stuff like that would
be useful.
- graphic analysis tools: They can as of now only be used for time-series.
As the model goes on, the graph goes on. How about having other variables
except time on the x-axis? so that you could visualize the distribution of
a number of variables for each time step. You would have your
possible values on the x-axis and their probability or whatever on the
y-axis.

If I'm not mistaken, these things are not included in Swarm. They can be
done, but the amount of programming might not be appropriate for just one
model. Instead, it would be appropriate to program them once so they could
be used for every model after that.
How does everybody else feel about this? Do you folks need this stuff,
too? More important: Who already has it??

Matthias



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