Questions about mathematical and statistical functionality in Python

[Michael Hoffman]

Talbot Katz wrote:

> 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).

I use both R and Python for my work. I think R is probably better for 
most of the stuff you are mentioning. I do any sort of heavy 
lifting--database queries/tabulation/aggregation in Python and load the 
resulting data frames into R for analysis and graphics.
-- 
Michael Hoffman