[MRG] Add development doc

doc/developers_utils.rst

@@ -0,0 +1,98 @@
+.. _developers-utils:
+
+========================
+Utilities for Developers
+========================
+
+Imbalanced-learn contains a number of utilities to help with development. These are
+located in :mod:`imblearn.utils`, and include tools in a number of categories.
+All the following functions and classes are in the module :mod:`imblearn.utils`.
+
+.. warning ::
+
+   These utilities are meant to be used internally within the imbalanced-learn
+   package. They are not guaranteed to be stable between versions of
+   imbalance-learn. Backports, in particular, will be removed as the
+   imbalance-learn dependencies evolve.
+
+.. currentmodule:: imblearn.utils
+
+Validation Tools
+================
+
+These are tools used to check and validate input. When you write a function
+which accepts arrays, matrices, or sparse matrices as arguments, the following
+should be used when applicable.
+
+- :func:`check_neighbors_object`: Check the objects is consistent to be a NN.
+- :func:`check_target_type`: Check the target types to be conform to the current samplers.
+- :func:`check_ratio`: Checks ratio for consistent type and return a dictionary
+    containing each targeted class with its corresponding number of pixel.
+
+Deprecation
+-----------
+
+.. warning ::
+   Apart from :func:`deprecate_parameter` the rest of this section is taken from
+   scikit-learn. Please refer to their original documentation.
+
+If any publicly accessible method, function, attribute or parameter
+is renamed, we still support the old one for two releases and issue
+a deprecation warning when it is called/passed/accessed.
+E.g., if the function ``zero_one`` is renamed to ``zero_one_loss``,
+we add the decorator ``deprecated`` (from ``sklearn.utils``)
+to ``zero_one`` and call ``zero_one_loss`` from that function::
+
+    from ..utils import deprecated
+
+    def zero_one_loss(y_true, y_pred, normalize=True):
+        # actual implementation
+        pass
+
+    @deprecated("Function 'zero_one' was renamed to 'zero_one_loss' "
+                "in version 0.13 and will be removed in release 0.15. "
+                "Default behavior is changed from 'normalize=False' to "
+                "'normalize=True'")
+    def zero_one(y_true, y_pred, normalize=False):
+        return zero_one_loss(y_true, y_pred, normalize)
+
+If an attribute is to be deprecated,
+use the decorator ``deprecated`` on a property.
+E.g., renaming an attribute ``labels_`` to ``classes_`` can be done as::
+
+    @property
+    @deprecated("Attribute labels_ was deprecated in version 0.13 and "
+                "will be removed in 0.15. Use 'classes_' instead")
+    def labels_(self):
+        return self.classes_
+
+If a parameter has to be deprecated, use ``DeprecationWarning`` appropriately.
+In the following example, k is deprecated and renamed to n_clusters::
+
+    import warnings
+
+    def example_function(n_clusters=8, k=None):
+        if k is not None:
+            warnings.warn("'k' was renamed to n_clusters in version 0.13 and "
+                          "will be removed in 0.15.", DeprecationWarning)
+            n_clusters = k
+
+As in these examples, the warning message should always give both the
+version in which the deprecation happened and the version in which the
+old behavior will be removed. If the deprecation happened in version
+0.x-dev, the message should say deprecation occurred in version 0.x and
+the removal will be in 0.(x+2). For example, if the deprecation happened
+in version 0.18-dev, the message should say it happened in version 0.18
+and the old behavior will be removed in version 0.20.
+
+In addition, a deprecation note should be added in the docstring, recalling the
+same information as the deprecation warning as explained above. Use the
+``.. deprecated::`` directive::
+
+  .. deprecated:: 0.13
+     ``k`` was renamed to ``n_clusters`` in version 0.13 and will be removed
+     in 0.15.
+
+On the top of all the functionality provided by scikit-learn. Imbalance-learn
+provides :func:`deprecate_parameter`: which is used to deprecate a sampler's
+parameter (attribute) by another one.

doc/user_guide.rst

@@ -15,3 +15,4 @@ User Guide
    combine.rst
    ensemble.rst
    Dataset loading utilities <datasets/index.rst>
+   developers_utils.rst