Statistics functionality would be extremely interesting. The idea would be to duplicate the basic notions of the mathematical theory as C++ classes.
The conceptual hyrarchy (bottom to top) is as follows: 1. Probability distribution (implementation: random number generator). 2. Random Object (Random variable, random vector) implementation: this is your "stats class" 3. Stochastic process. This thread places to much importance on the "stats class" as a container of data. Obviously this view results from the fact that most users work from preexisting data sets which are read into a container. This is what is called an empirical distribution and could be handled as special case of a random variable -- an empirical random variable. The case of the preexisting data set is a fairly trivial case. More generally the data are generated by some procedure (special case: reading from the preexisting data set). The procedure could be more interesting than this. For example in Monte Carlo simulation one often computes the path of some stochastic process and then generates a data point as a functional (deterministic function) of this path. The notion of a random variable should capture all this. I have already implemented some useful abstractions in Java. See http://martingale.berlios.de/Martingale.html I am working on C++ now and will gladly contribute code to Boost. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more http://taxes.yahoo.com/ _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost
