"I'd rather do math in a general-purpose language than try to do general-purpose programming in a math language." | ||
| -- John D Cook | ||
Python has become one of the most popular programming languages in scientific computing over the last decade. The reasons for its success are numerous, and these will gradually become apparent as you proceed with this book. Unlike many other mathematical languages, such as MATLAB, R and Mathematica, Python is a general-purpose programming language. As such, it provides a suitable framework to build scientific applications and extend them further into any commercial or academic domain. For example, consider a (somewhat) simple application that requires you to write a piece of software and predicts the popularity of a blog post. Usually, these would be the steps that you'd take to do this:
- Generating a corpus of blog posts and their corresponding ratings (assuming that the ratings here are suitably quantifiable).
- Formulating a model that generates ratings based on content and other data associated with the blog post.
- Training a model on the basis of the data you found in step 1. Keep doing this until you are confident of the reliability of the model.
- Deploying the model as a web service.
Normally, as you move through these steps, you will find yourself jumping between different software stacks. Step 1 requires a lot of web scraping. Web scraping is a very common problem, and there are tools in almost every programming language to scrape the Web (if you are already using Python, you would probably choose Beautiful Soup or Scrapy). Steps 2 and 3 involve solving a machine learning problem and require the use of sophisticated mathematical languages or frameworks, such as Weka or MATLAB, which are only a few of the vast variety of tools that provide machine learning functionality. Similarly, step 4 can be implemented in many ways using many different tools. There isn't one right answer. Since this is a problem that has been amply studied and solved (to a reasonable extent) by a lot of scientists and software developers, getting a working solution would not be difficult. However, there are issues, such as stability and scalability, that might severely restrict your choice of programming languages, web frameworks, or machine learning algorithms in each step of the problem. This is where Python wins over most other programming languages. All the preceding steps (and more) can be accomplished with only Python and a few third-party Python libraries. This flexibility and ease of developing software in Python is precisely what makes it a comfortable host for a scientific computing ecosystem. A very interesting interpretation of Python's prowess as a mature application development language can be found in Python Data Analysis, Ivan Idris, Packt Publishing. Precisely, Python is a language that is used for rapid prototyping, and it is also used to build production-quality software because of the vast scientific ecosystem it has acquired over time. The cornerstone of this ecosystem is NumPy.
Numerical Python (NumPy) is a successor to the Numeric package. It was originally written by Travis Oliphant to be the foundation of a scientific computing environment in Python. It branched off from the much wider SciPy module in early 2005 and had its first stable release in mid-2006. Since then, it has enjoyed growing popularity among Pythonists who work in the mathematics, science, and engineering fields. The goal of this book is to make you conversant enough with NumPy so that you're able to use it and can build complex scientific applications with it.
Let's begin by taking a brief tour of the Scientific Python (SciPy) stack.
Note
Note that SciPy can mean a number of things: the Python module named scipy (http://www.scipy.org/scipylib), the entire SciPy stack (http://www.scipy.org/about.html), or any of the three conferences on scientific Python that take place all over the world.
Fernando Perez, the primary author of IPython, said in his keynote at PyCon, Canada 2012:
"Computing in science has evolved not only because software has evolved, but also because we, as scientists, are doing much more than just floating point arithmetic."
This is precisely why the SciPy stack boasts such rich functionality. The evolution of most of the SciPy stack is motivated by teams of scientists and engineers trying to solve scientific and engineering problems in a general-purpose programming language. A one-line explanation of why NumPy matters so much is that it provides the core multidimensional array object that is necessary for most tasks in scientific computing. This is why it is at the root of the SciPy stack. NumPy provides an easy way to interface with legacy Fortran and C/C++ numerical code using time-tested scientific libraries, which we know have been working well for decades. Companies and labs across the world use Python to glue together legacy code that has been around for a long time. In short, this means that NumPy allows us to stand on the shoulders of giants; we do not have to reinvent the wheel. It is a dependency for every other SciPy package. The NumPy ndarray object, which is the subject of the next chapter, is essentially a Pythonic interface to data structures used by libraries written in Fortran, C, and, C++. In fact, the internal memory layouts used by NumPy ndarray objects implement C and Fortran layouts. This will be addressed in detail in upcoming chapters.
The next layer in the stack consists of SciPy, matplotlib, IPython (the interactive shell of Python; we will use it for the examples throughout the book, and details of its installation and usage will be provided in later sections), and SymPy modules. SciPy provides the bulk of the scientific and numerical functionality that a major part of the ecosystem relies on. Matplotlib is the de facto plotting and data visualization library in Python. IPython is an increasingly popular interactive environment for scientific computing in Python. In fact, the project has had such active development and enjoyed such popularity that it is no longer limited to Python and extends its features to other scientific languages, particularly R and Julia. This layer in the stack can be thought of as a bridge between the core array-oriented functionality of NumPy and the domain-specific abstractions provided by the higher layers of the stack. These domain-specific tools are commonly called SciKits-popular ones among them are scikit-image (image processing), scikit-learn (machine learning), statsmodels (statistics), pandas (advanced data analysis), and so on. Listing every scientific package in Python would be nearly impossible since the scientific Python community is very active, and there is always a lot of development happening for a large number of scientific problems. The best way to keep track of projects is to get involved in the community. It is immensely useful to join mailing lists, contribute to code, use the software for your daily computational needs, and report bugs. One of the goals of this book is to get you interested enough to actively involve yourself in the scientific Python community.
A fundamental question that beginners ask is. Why are arrays necessary for scientific computing at all? Surely, one can perform complex mathematical operations on any abstract data type, such as a list. The answer lies in the numerous properties of arrays that make them significantly more useful. In this section, let's go over a few of these properties to emphasize why something such as the NumPy ndarray object exists at all.
The abstract mathematical concepts of matrices and vectors are central to many scientific problems. Arrays provide a direct semantic link to these concepts. Indeed, whenever a piece of mathematical literature makes reference to a matrix, one can safely think of an array as the software abstraction that represents the matrix. In scientific literature, an expression such as Aij is typically used to denote the element in the i th row and j th column of array A. The corresponding expression in NumPy would simply be A[i,j]. For matrix operations, NumPy arrays also support vectorization (details are addressed in Chapter 3 , Using NumPy Arrays), which speeds up execution greatly. Vectorization makes the code more concise, easier to read, and much more akin to mathematical notation. Like matrices, arrays can be multidimensional too. Every element of an array is addressable through a set of integers called indices, and the process of accessing elements of an array with sets of integers is called indexing. This functionality can indeed be implemented without using arrays, but this would be cumbersome and quite unnecessary.
Efficiency can mean a number of things in software. The term may be used to refer to the speed of execution of a program, its data retrieval and storage performance, its memory overhead (the memory consumed when a program is executing), or its overall throughput. NumPy arrays are better than most other data structures with respect to almost all of these characteristics (with a few exceptions such as pandas, DataFrames, or SciPy's sparse matrices, which we shall deal with in later chapters). Since NumPy arrays are statically typed and homogenous, fast mathematical operations can be implemented in compiled languages (the default implementation uses C and Fortran). Efficiency (the availability of fast algorithms working on homogeneous arrays) makes NumPy popular and important.
The NumPy module is a powerhouse of off-the-shelf functionality for mathematical tasks. It adds greatly to Python's ease of development. The following is a brief summary of what the module contains, most of which we shall explore in this book. A far more detailed treatment of the NumPy module is in the definitive Guide to NumPy, Travis Oliphat. The NumPy API is so flexible that it has been adopted extensively by the scientific Python community as the standard API to build scientific applications. Examples of how this standard is applied across scientific disciplines can be found in The NumPy Array: a structure for efficient numerical computation, Van Der Walt, and others:
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Submodule |
Contents |
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Basic objects |
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Additional utilities |
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Basic linear algebra |
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Discrete Fourier transforms |
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Random number generators |
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Enhanced build and distribution |
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Unit testing |
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Automatic wrapping of the Fortran code |
It is said that, if you stand at Times Square long enough, you will meet everyone in the world. By now, you must have been convinced that NumPy is the Times Square of SciPy. If you are writing scientific applications in Python, there is not much you can do without digging into NumPy. Figure 2 shows the scope of SciPy in scientific computing at varying levels of abstraction. The red arrow denotes the various low-level functions that are expected of scientific software, and the blue arrow denotes the different application domains that exploit these functions. Python, armed with the SciPy stack, is at the forefront of the languages that provide these capabilities.
A Google Scholar search for NumPy returns nearly 6,280 results. Some of these are papers and articles about NumPy and the SciPy stack itself, and many more are about NumPy's applications in a wide variety of research problems. Academics love Python, which is showcased by the increasing popularity of the SciPy stack as the primary language of scientific programming in countless universities and research labs all over the world. The experiences of many scientists and software professionals have been published on the Python website:
Now that the credibility of Python and NumPy has been established, let's get our hands dirty.
The default environment used for all Python code in this book will be IPython. Instructions on how to install IPython and other tools follow in the next section. Throughout the book, you will only have to enter input in either the command window or the IPython prompt. Unless otherwise specified, code will refer to Python code, and
command
will refer to bash or DOS commands.
All Python input code will be formatted in snippets like these:
In [42]: print("Hello, World!")
In [42]: in the preceding snippet indicates that this is the 42nd input to the IPython session. Similarly, all input to the command line will be formatted as follows:
$ python hello_world.py
On Windows systems, the same command will look something like this:
C:\Users\JohnDoe> python hello_world.py
For the sake of consistency, the $ sign will be used to denote the command-line prompt, regardless of OS. Prompts, such as C:\Users\JohnDoe>, will not appear in the book. While, conventionally, the $ sign indicates bash prompts on Unix systems, the same commands (without typing the actual dollar sign or any other character), can be used on Windows too. If, however, you are using Cygwin or Git Bash, you should be able to use Bash commands on Windows too.
Note that Git Bash is available by default if you install Git on Windows.
Let's take a look at the various requirements we need to set up before we proceed.
The three most important Python modules you need for this book are NumPy, IPython, and matplotlib; in this book, the code is based on the Python 3.4/2.7- compatible version, NumPy version 1.9, and matplotlib 1.4.3. The easiest way to install these requirements (and more) is to install a complete Python distribution, such as Enthought Canopy, EPD, Anaconda, or Python (x,y). Once you have installed any one of these, you can safely skip the remainder of this section and should be ready to begin.
Note
Note for Canopy users: You can use the Canopy GUI, which includes an embedded IPython console, a text editor, and IPython notebook editors. When working with the command line, for best results use the Canopy Terminal found in Canopy's Tools menu.
Note for Windows OS users: Besides the Python distribution, you can also install the prebuilt Windows python extended packages from Ghristoph Gohlke's website at http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/
You can also use Python package managers, such enpkg, Conda, pip or easy_install, to install the requirements using one of the following commands; replace numpy with any other package name you'd like to install, for example, ipython, matplotlib and so on:
$ pip install numpy
$ easy_install numpy
$ enpkg numpy # for Canopy users
$ conda install numpy # for Anaconda users
If the Python interpreter you want to use comes with the OS and is not a third-party installation, you may prefer using OS-specific package managers such as aptitude, yum, or Homebrew. The following table illustrates the package managers and the respective commands used to install NumPy:
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Package managers |
Commands |
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Aptitude |
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Yum |
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Homebrew |
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Note that, when installing NumPy (or any other Python modules) on OS X systems with Homebrew, Python should have been originally installed with Homebrew.
Detailed installation instructions are available on the respective websites of NumPy, IPython, and matplotlib. As a precaution, to check whether NumPy was installed properly, open an IPython terminal and type the following commands:
In [1]: import numpy as np In [2]: np.test()
If the first statement looks like it does nothing, this is a good sign. If it executes without any output, this means that NumPy was installed and has been imported properly into your Python session. The second statement runs the NumPy test suite. It is not critically necessary, but one can never be too cautious. Ideally, it should run for a few minutes and produce the test results. It may generate a few warnings, but these are no cause for alarm. If you wish, you may run the test suites of IPython and matplotlib, too.
Note
Note that the matplotlib test suite only runs reliably if matplotlib has been installed from a source. However, testing matplotlib is not very necessary. If you can import matplotlib without any errors, it indicates that it is ready for use.
Congratulations! We are now ready to begin.
In this chapter, we introduced ourselves to the NumPy module. We took a look at how NumPy is a useful software tool to have for those of you who are working in scientific computing. We installed the software required to proceed through the rest of this book.
In next chapter, we will get to the powerful NumPy ndarray object, showing you how to use it efficiently.
