[Insight-developers] What to do about statistics...

[Jim Miller]

So I am trying to be a good little soldier and do my code reviews for ITKv4. (This could serve as a gentle reminder to all the contractors that we all have a stack of files to review and report.)  I decide its time to dive into the statistics library. Grab the first file that looks interesting, itkDecisionRuleBase. Fix up the documentation, add a missing overloaded method, remove an unnecessary PrintSelf implementation.  I am flying. Start working on the subclasses to itkDecisionRuleBase. Got a little sidetracked by a compiler error for a subclass I hadn't gotten to. Then I realize there is a class called itkDecisionRule. Look through that. Not a subclass it itkDecisionRuleBase. Odd. It doesn't overload the Evaluate() method. Odd. All its subclasses have the same name as those that derive from itkDecisionRuleBase but with a number "2" at the end of the name. Again odd. Realized that DecisionRule is in the statistics namespace but DecisionRuleBase is not. Odd. Start doing "git log" on files. Discover I need to use "git log --follow" to see the logs connect to before the modularization. Come to realize that this mayhem is part of the refactoring of the statistics library done in 2007(?). Google a bit to find the wiki page that talks about the statistics refactoring of 2007 and a migration guide page that says that itkDecisionRuleBase was refactored into itkDecisionRule and removed the overloaded methods for Evaluate().

So... what to do.

Looks like last August, we (Hans) made the statistics library in the Review directory the default and removed the old statistics library(?). But this left behind the itkDecisionRuleBase and subclasses. I expect these were either left because (a) there were actually in Common not Statistics so it wasn't obvious that they needed to be removed, or (b) left for some level of backward compatibility.

What do we want to do with these classes from the original statistics library?  We could:

1) Remove them. This has a corollary of what to do with the *2 versions of the classes. Should we rename them?
2) Keep them as is.
3) Keep them but have them use the new classes.



Jim Miller
Senior Scientist
GE Research 
Interventional and Therapy

GE imagination at work

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