I want to discuss plans for future Incanter development, and I’m looking for volunteers interested in contributing to any of the following projects, as well as suggestions for other improvements.
My list of priorities, in no particular order:
1. Create new functions based on the Java libraries already included in Incanter. For instance, I would like to improve incanter.optimize by a) including the nonlinear optimization routines available in Parallel Colt b) writing new routines in Clojure, and c) improving the existing routines.
2. Integrate Parallel Colt’s sparse matrix support, as suggested by Mark Reid.
3. Expose more of the chart customizability of JFreeChart in the incanter.chart library, e.g. enabling annotations of categorical charts, allowing users to set the scale on axes, customizing colors, etc..
4. Create an incanter.viz library, consisting of Processing-based data visualizations.
5. Integrate the Weka machine learning library.
6. Provide additional statistical methods.
7. Optimize existing functions; in general, I have favored ease-of-use and expressibility over performance, but there is A LOT of room to optimize without compromising usability.
Any other suggestions or feedback is welcome, and should be directed to the Incanter Goolge Group, where I have started an “Incanter Roadmap” thread. You can subscribe to the mailing list here.
David
Data Sorcery with Clojure 