Python: Real-World Data Science

Chapter 2. NumPy Arrays and Vectorized Computation

NumPy is the fundamental package supported for presenting and computing data with high performance in Python. It provides some interesting features as follows:

• Extension package to Python for multidimensional arrays (ndarrays), various derived objects (such as masked arrays), matrices providing vectorization operations, and broadcasting capabilities. Vectorization can significantly increase the performance of array computations by taking advantage of Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) instruction sets in modern CPUs.
• Fast and convenient operations on arrays of data, including mathematical manipulation, basic statistical operations, sorting, selecting, linear algebra, random number generation, ...