[SciPy-User] How to fit data with errorbars

Nathaniel Smith njs at pobox.com
Wed Feb 17 00:22:01 EST 2010


On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 8:36 PM,  <josef.pktd at gmail.com> wrote:
> But it's more fun trying to figure out how to do it in python than how
> to do it in R or rpy.

Maybe -- I already know R, so sunk costs, etc., oh well. It's much
less pointless than learning Matlab, at least...

> (But maybe not so much if I have to figure out both for doing the
> validation tests. I've seen that your incremental_ls also uses R only
> for validation and not for the heavy duty stuff.)

Yeah, no question Python is a nicer language for greenfield projects.
But in the project I wrote incremental_ls for, the higher-level API
actually still takes R model specifications (like "y ~ x1 + log(x2) +
Subject" or whatever), shoves it through rpy (or rather, my wrapper
'rnumpy'), and then uses it to construct the actual model matrix.
There's just a huge amount of statistical wisdom and tricky code
already built in there -- it's too bad the interpreter was written by
statisticians instead of language engineers.

But this is getting pretty off-topic...

-- Nathaniel



More information about the SciPy-User mailing list