14 Feb 2014 danstowell   » (Journeyer)

Python scipy gotcha: scoreatpercentile

Agh, I just got caught out by a "silent" change in the behaviour of scipy for Python. By "silent" I mean it doesn't seem to be in the scipy 0.12 changelog even though it should be. I'm documenting it here in case anyone else needs to know:

Here's the simple code example - using scoreatpercentile to find a percentile for some 2D array:

import numpy as np
from scipy.stats import scoreatpercentile
scoreatpercentile(np.eye(5), 50)

On my laptop with scipy 11.0 (and numpy 1.7.1) the answer is:

array([ 0.,  0.,  0.,  0.,  0.])

On our lab machine with scipy 13.3 (and numpy 1.7.0) the answer is:

0.0

In the first case, it calculates the percentile along one axis. In the second, it calculates the percentile of the flattened array, because in scipy 12 someone added a new "axis" argument to the function, whose default value "None" means to analyse the flattened array. Bah! Nice feature, but a shame about the compatibility. (P.S. I've logged it with the scipy team.)

Syndicated 2014-02-14 08:37:38 (Updated 2014-02-14 08:38:35) from Dan Stowell

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