Hi Daniel, thanks for your interest in participating in GSoC with PyMC. Tagging @fonnesbeck and @bwengals for them to weigh in if they have time.
Improving PyMC’s functionality for spatial, especially areal, data analysis sounds like a great idea, especially since the models that you’ve mentioned seem more available in Stan and in other R packages (CARBayes, for instance). My prof from my course on spatial data analysis was one of my strongest influences to dive deeper into Bayesian statistics, especially in the context of modelling areal data.
Just wanted to highlight two things:
- The deadline for GSoC applications are on April 4, 18:00 UTC time which is in 2 days. You’re welcome to share a proposal if you want us to give some preliminary comments, but the deadline is near so we cannot guarantee anything.
- Porting Junpeng’s notebook to v5 sounds like a great first goal! You could also push the addition of the ICAR random variable. We do have CAR and we’ve had substantial progress on ICAR (PR 4851). Not sure where the current state of that is… Perhaps @fonnesbeck would know better. (I’m also forgetting the differences between CAR and ICAR.)
Let us know if you have any other questions!