Questions about mathematical and statistical functionality in Python

[John Krukoff]

On Jun 14, 4:02 pm, "Talbot Katz" <topk... at msn.com> wrote: 
> Greetings Pythoners!
> 
> I hope you'll indulge an ignorant outsider.  I work at a financial
> software
> firm, and the tool I currently use for my research is R, a software
> environment for statistical computing and graphics.  R is designed with
> matrix manipulation in mind, and it's very easy to do regression and time
> series modeling, and to plot the results and test hypotheses.  The kinds
> of
> functionality we rely on the most are standard and robust versions of
> regression and principal component / factor analysis, bayesian methods
> such
> as Gibbs sampling and shrinkage, and optimization by linear, quadratic,
> newtonian / nonlinear, and genetic programming; frequently used graphics
> include QQ plots and histograms.  In R, these procedures are all available
> as functions (some of them are in auxiliary libraries that don't come with
> the standard distribution, but are easily downloaded from a central
> repository).
> 
> For a variety of reasons, the research group is considering adopting
> Python.
>   Naturally, I am curious about the mathematical, statistical, and
> graphical
> functionality available in Python.  Do any of you out there use Python in
> financial research, or other intense mathematical/statistical computation?
> Can you compare working in Python with working in a package like R or S-
> Plus
> or Matlab, etc.?  Which of the procedures I mentioned above are available
> in
> Python?  I appreciate any insight you can provide.  Thanks!
> 
> --  TMK  --
> 212-460-5430	home
> 917-656-5351	cell
> 
> 
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

It is worth noting that there's a bridge available to allow python to
integrate cleanly with R, the Rpy project:
http://rpy.sourceforge.net/

Which should allow you to use python for whatever it is you need without
abandoning R for your mathematical/statistical work.

---------
John Krukoff
jkrukoff at ltgc.com