SciPy and NumPy

Chapter 3. SciPy

With NumPy we can achieve fast solutions with simple coding. Where does SciPy come into the picture? It’s a package that utilizes NumPy arrays and manipulations to take on standard problems that scientists and engineers commonly face: integration, determining a function’s maxima or minima, finding eigenvectors for large sparse matrices, testing whether two distributions are the same, and much more. We will cover just the basics here, which will allow you to take advantage of the more complex features in SciPy by going through easy examples that are applicable to real-world problems.

We will start with optimization and data fitting, as these are some of the most common tasks, and then move through interpolation, integration, spatial analysis, clustering, signal and image processing, sparse matrices, and statistics.

3.1 Optimization

The optimization package in SciPy allows us to solve minimization problems easily and quickly. But wait: what is minimization and how can it help you with your work? Some classic examples are performing linear regression, finding a function’s minimum and maximum values, determining the root of a function, and finding where two functions intersect. Below we begin with a simple linear regression and then expand it to fitting non-linear data.

Tip

The optimization and minimization tools that NumPy and SciPy provide are great, but they do not have Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) capabilities—in other words, Bayesian analysis. There are several popular ...